John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy

John Carpenter is one of my favorite directors for a number of reasons, not least of which is his soundtracks.  Carpenter films SOUND the same, and you almost feel like they all exist in the same universe some how.  But one of the main reasons I like him is that he’s a fan of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos.  He’s also the only director to get a film that is, in many ways, a version of “At the Mountains of Madness” off the ground.

It’s that film and two others that I’d like to talk about, the three films that make up Carpenter’s unofficial “Apocalypse Trilogy”.

The first film is The Thing.  Released in 1982, The Thing is actually a remake of an earlier film, The Thing From Another World (1951).  The movie is based on a short story, Who Goes There, by John W. Campbell Jr., written in 1938 and published in Astounding Science-Fiction.  The story is about a remote base in Antarctica and a shapeshifting alien that can absorb and take over a life form.  It’s a great mix of both science fiction and horror.  The reason it’s part of an “apocalypse” is that during the film, Blair, the team biologist (played by DIABEETUS…er…Wilford Brimley) calculates the time it would take for the alien to take over all human life on Earth if it escapes – it’s just about three years.

The primary protagonist of the film is MacReady (Kurt Russell), who is a rough edged chopper pilot.  By the end of the film, we can’t be sure if MacReady is actually human or not, nor if Childs, the only other survivor, might not be the alien. Either way, there’s no escape.  Both are doomed, though one might simply go into hibernation again, to be found by a rescue crew.  It’s this undefined, unknown consequence that really defines these three films.  None of them end on a happy note.

The second film in the trilogy, which are not connected storywise, is 1987′s Prince of Darkness.  This film also mixes science fiction with horror, this time presenting a secret that the Catholic church has kept hidden for millennia. Essentially, the Devil is a self-organizing abstract equation kept in a special glass container.  A team of students from a local university are brought in to study the device after its caretaker dies and it begins to become active.

As the movie progresses, the evil in the container escapes, possessing several of the students.  In the end, a sacrifice by the protagonist’s love interest stops Lucifer from bringing his father (the “anti-god”) into the world.  The movie’s hero is played by Jameson Parker, mostly known for his work on Simon and Simon.  He’s really not a good fit for this role, but that’s ok because the movie also features the late Victor Wong (Egg Chen in Big Trouble in Little China) and Dennis Dun (also from Big Trouble in Little China), plus a cameo of Alice Cooper as a crazed homeless man under the devil’s influence.  The movie ends with a suitably creepy scene that makes you wonder if they really stopped the anti-god or not.

The final film is 1995′s In The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter’s love note to the Cthulhu Mythos by way of Stephen King. The story is about an insurance adjustor who investigates the appearance of the world’s most popular author, who happens to write Cthulhlian stories that are so popular, people actually start to become part of them.  He is revealed to be in a small town that exists only in his books, and the insurance agent, played perfectly by Sam Neill, becomes the unwitting prophet that delivers the final book, the book that will drive the world into madness, to the publisher.

The movie plays with the concept of shared reality, and how much of our perception of the world is based on the rules we all agree to.  Madness is more abstract here, with Neill’s character slowly slipping into insanity as the rules of reality seem to crumble around him.  Carpenter has said the movie is more Stephen King that Lovecraft, but there are parts lifted directly from The Haunter of the Dark, and the Old Ones are clearly Lovecraftian.  This film is probably the most successful mythos film, while not being directly connected to the mythos.

The three films together form the “apocalypse trilogy” because in the end, in all three, the world may be doomed, though only in the third, In The Mouth of Madness, is the world specifically threatened.  These three films, viewed together, are very bleak.  They’re a perfect rainy Sunday companion if you want to get your horror geek on.

 

Slender Man Song – Let this get stuck in your head

It’s so catchy…

 

Another Graphic – The Kills of Vorhees

Another article from The National Post – this time counting the kills of Friday the 13th’s Jason Vorhees.  Note this is only through Jason X, not the remake(s).

 

Sexy, Scary, Simple

The three S’s of horror, all in a single gif image. Yes, that’s all just body paint and grainy film effects.  Click for the full effect.

 

Zombie Speed Factor

If you’ve watched the trailer for World War Z, you’ve no doubt seen that the zombies move with incredible, even supernatural, speed.  Let’s forget for the moment that this is entirely wrong compared to the book (I think we all know this movie is going to have about as much to do with the source it came from as The Lawnmower Man did).  This is a new zombie paradigm, and I thought it might be fun to look at some of the classics.

Here we have a handy chart I produced in Excel (I’m an Excel monkey in real life). It’s a scale from one to ten of zombie speeds.  Five is average human speed (including running).  Anything lower than five would be a “shambler”, while above five is a “fast zombie”.

We start with Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead/Dawn of the Dead.  These are the true shamblers that defined zombies for decades.  Zombieland mostly had a similar speed, with the characters often outrunning or ducking the zombies.

At three, we have an odd couple.  Shaun of the Dead is mostly the same as the Romero version, but we see several times where the z-words make lunges and chase Shaun, though they aren’t very quick.  The Walking Dead…well, they walk.  They are called ”walkers”.  They don’t shamble much, but they also don’t run very often.

At average human speed (including running), we have The Living Dead, which are actually the most dangerous of all the zombies since you really can’t kill them.  Cabin in the Woods introduces us to the inbred cannibal hillbilly zombies, which seem to move at a normal pace.

Both Resident Evil and Rec (or the English language version, Quarantine) feature zombies that are generally slightly faster than humans.  In Resident Evil, the standard zombie is mostly a shambler, but I’ve put it at a seven because of the special zombies, like the Licker or Nemesis who are very quick and/or can leap long distances.  With Rec, you have zombies that no longer have human limitations on muscles and pain, and can therefore run and climb much faster than a real person would.

Coming in at an eight is the movie that really first gave us the “fast zombie”, 28 Days Later.  These zombies (or “infected” since they aren’t really dead) move fast because of the Rage virus that amps their adrenaline to superhuman levels.  You don’t get a great sense of how fast they are, but again, they were genre defining, so I’ve given them the second to highest rating.

And finally, you have World War Z at ten.  From the trailer we see a wave of zombies climbing over each other, surging forward.  Or at least they might be zombies.  I can’t entirely tell, and after seeing it, I might reclassify them.  This is also the point that I reiterate that this movie looks like it has almost zero in common with the book, so I can’t make estimates that way either.  For now we’ll keep it at ten.

I’d love to expand this list, so if anyone has zombie films or shows they’d like to see added, please drop a comment.  Movies and TV only – no books or I’d be updating this forever.

 

Light has weight. How horrible.

Stephen King’s IT is one of my favorite books of all times.  At one point Ben Hanscomb remembers how awful he felt when he learned in school that light has weight.  That was one of those things that struck me, how very human a reaction that is, to learn that something you take for granted, like light, is actually pushing down on you.  We accept air, of course, because we can feel it, but light?  How horrible.

Many of you are probably ready to throttle me for saying “weight” instead of “mass”.  It’s true, it’s not actually weight.  Weight is a measure of how much gravity is affecting an object.  But mass is just as incorrect.  Mass is a measurement of how much matter makes up an object.  Light does not have mass per se, as it’s energy, not matter.  But it does push against you.  This is the principle behind the idea of solar sails, for example.  Photons push against the sail, moving the vessel attached.

Truly, Tron was ahead of its time.

So it’s not really correct to say that light has weight or mass, but rather “push”.  But how much push?  A new article at IO9.com explains just how much, though they approach it from the negative state: How much does a shadow weigh?  The great thing is that this is a Vsauce video, and Vsauce is awesome.

Yes, Ben, light does have “weight”.  How horrible.  How horrible.

 

The Books of Robert

You probably know what the Necronomicon is.  If you don’t, go read a book, philistine!  But assuming you do, either from reading the works of Lovecraft and the mythos or maybe just from watching Evil Dead and Army of Darkness, you know that it’s a book of ancient knowledge that can send a man mad from its eldritch revelations.  But what about the other tomes?  There are so many in the Cthulhu mythos, and many are just as madness inducing as the Necronomicon itself.  Today, I’d like to introduce you to three different works, all by men named Robert.

Unaussprechlichen Kulten

The first work is the mostly scholarly tome of Friedrich von Junzt, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or as it’s usually translated in English, Nameless Cults.  A better translation might be Unspeakable Cults or Unpronounceable Cults.  This book was actually created by Robert E. Howard, better known for creating Conan the Barbarian.  The book itself is modeled after the real life work of Margaret Mead, noted cultural anthropologist, who traveled the world and wrote extensively about native cultures and their traditions.  The fictional von Junzt did much the same, except instead of local tribes, he investigated cults and their practices.

The book was published in 1839, with a badly translated English version going to press in 1845.  A better translation, highly expurgated (censored, in layman’s terms), was produced by Golden Goblin Press in 1909.  Most of the first editions of the 1839 German work and the 1845 English work were destroyed, but the 1909 version, while uncommon, is not difficult to acquire.  This is why most investigators of the mythos have a copy of this work, or run across it early in their (usually limited) careers.

The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow is not precisely a tome, but instead is a play by an unknown author about three characters, Cassilda, Camilla, and the titular King in Yellow.  The first act of the play is unremarkable, but the second act drives those who merely read it insane.  Were it ever actually performed, the world might well end.  There’s no specific information about what’s in the second act, but it’s know that it deals with lost Carcosa on the shores of Lake Hali, and involves He Who Shall Not Be Named (Hastur).  The King wears a mask with the Yellow Sign, which can also drive men mad merely by seeing it.

The play is an invention of Robert W. Chambers based on names borrowed from Ambrose Bierce. There’s always been (intentional) confusion about what the play is actually about – Carcosa may be a city on another planet, or a family name, or possibly a fourth character.  Hali may be a lake, or a city, or the planet.  Hastur may or may not be named explicitly (and the whole “He Who Shall Not Be Named” comes from this – suck it Harry Potter fans, this was published in 1895!).  The Dead Milkmen used the name of this play for the title of their 2011 album.

De Vermis Mysteriis

In English, Mysteries of the Worm, this work has the distinction of being just and hideous as the Necronomicon itself.  In fact, it was De Vermis Mysteriis that was first described as having an edition with human body parts involved – the Necronomicon in Evil Dead is said to be bound in human flesh and inked in blood, De Vermis Mysteriis was said to be made of sheets of human vellum and bound with hasps of human bone.  Ludwig Prinn, the author of this tome, was a medieval wizard, and his lineage eventually made their way to Salem, Massachusetts during the infamous witch trials.  The author himself was also burned at the stake.

This book of ancient evil was created by Robert Bloch, best known for being the author of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece.  This work has shown up in many other stories, including Jerusalem’s Lot by Stephen King.  The first Hellboy movie also made reference to this book, with Rasputin using it to open a portal to the Ogdru Jahad.  Lovecraft himself referred to the book as, “repeat the most hellish secrets learnt by early man.”

And there you have it, the books of Robert, all equals to the might Necronomicon, and in the case of the last entry, possibly its greater.  There are many, many more tomes that can be found in the mythos, and even the authors above created other works.  Robert E. Howard’s Book of Skelos for example, which appears both in his Conan stories and in his mythos tales, and was referenced in the movie Conan the Destroyer (as the “Scrolls of Skelos”).  The books grew to become more than their original intent as various authors added to their mystery.

Just like the Necronomicon, many people thought these books were quite real based on the detailed backgrounds and the way they appeared in multiple stories by separate authors.  Of course, now you can find books by these names which are collections of short stories by the creators of the fictional works – Chaosium, for example, has a book titled De Vermis Mysteriis which is a collection of Robert Bloch’s mythos tales.  This just further obscures whether there were ever real books with these titles.  Add to that the fact that often the mythos writers would reference actual books, like The Golden Dawn and the Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and you have even more confusion.

 

The 80s tried to traumatize children – Inhumanoids edition

The more and more I look back on cartoons and tv shows aimed at children in the 1980s, the more I realize that their creators were trying to traumatize kids for life.  Look at He-Man and the Masters of the Universe; the main villain is a blue skinned muscle man with a SKULL FOR A HEAD.  How about the Skeksis from Dark Crystal?  Vulture people with giant beetle henchmen.  Yeah, that’s not going to be traumatic.  How about Scooby Doo?  Remember the astronaut ghost?  The one who cackles and has a glowing skull head?  How about the green ghosts with rattling chains?  And this was what our parents parked us in front of for hours on end.

One show sticks with me, though.  In 1986 Hasbro and Marvel were thick as thieves.  Marvel literally helped create most of the iconic Hasbro lines: Transformers, for example, were piloted robots in Japan until Marvel gave them personalities (and names in many cases).  GI Joe’s Cobra was based on Marvel’s Hydra!  And in the mid 80s, there was an hour long syndicated cartoon block called Super Sunday, co-produced by Hasbro and Marvel.

Along with re-runs of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Super Sunday also showed original programs that were broken into 7-9 minute shorts.  One of the most famous was Jem and the Holograms, which has gained a cult status.  There were others, however, such as Robotix (based on the building toys), Bigfoot (the truck, not the cryptid), and the one shot original X-Men cartoon, Pryde of the X-Men.  And, of course, The Inhumanoids, which was, honestly, one of the most horrific cartoons ever made.

The Inhumanoids was the story of Earth Force, a group of government scientists (who in real life never get such cool project names) and their fight against giant monsters discovered underground, dubbed Inhumanoids.  The Earth Force had the help of sentient trees (someone liked Tolkien’s Treants a bit) known as the Redwoods, and rock people called the Granites (creative, huh?).  They were collectively known as Mutores.  The Mutores had long ago sealed away the evil Inhumanoids, but now humans had disturbed the seals and the ancient evil was waking up.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Lovecraft?  Ancient sleeping evil?  Anyone?

The leader of the Inhumanoids was a creature of living lava called Meltar (again, names…not so great).  He was sealed near the Earth’s core by a pair of magnetic Mutores called Magnokor (magnetism is his weakness, which honestly doesn’t sound completely stupid, so I’ll give some points back for the crappy names).  His two main lieutenants are Tendril, a giant plant monster, and D’Compose.  We’re going to talk more about D’Compose in a minute.

There’s actually a fairly complicated back story for these creatures.  Thousands of years ago, Meltar led a rebellion against the former Inhumanoid boss, Sslither (why yes, he is a giant snake man, why do you ask?) and went to war with the surface dwelling Mutores.  He failed and was locked away, as were his followers.  Note that Meltar could create lava men to do his bidding, so the guy literally can create troops at will, so this was not an easy battle.  The remaining Mutores sealed away the Inhumanoids and went into a kind of hibernation to keep them sealed.

D’Compose is found first, trapped in amber (remember, more about him in a bit), and due to the machinations of the evil Blackthorne Shore, a wealthy industrialist, Tendril is freed and he breaks his buddy out of the amber prison.  They then free Meltar.  The Earth Force has to use experimental weapons (read: TOYS!) to fight the creatures, while also sidestepping Blackthorne and his political might.

O.k., let’s get to D’Compose.  This guy is a giant rotting monster with an alligator skull head.  No, really.

This cartoon is made for children!

He’s a big, bloody, half skeletal monster that’s about thirty feet tall (or a hundred…you know, scale in kids cartoons in the 80s was iffy at best) and wants to PUT YOU IN HIS RIBCAGE FOR SAFE KEEPING.  That was his thing…he could imprison you in his fucking innards.  I could go on about how Tendril looked an awful lot like Cthulhu, but let’s just keep things straight here – we have a rot monster with a skull head who will grab you and stick you inside his ribs.  Perfect fun for the average 10-12 year old!

Not convinced this was nightmare fuel?  Well we haven’t gotten to D’Compose’s actual powers (sticking you in his ribs is just something he does for fun).  He can turn anyone he touches into a zombie.  He can also control those zombies.  He lives in an undead realm called Skullweb, which is filled with undead creatures he’s created.  Oh yeah, nice guy.  And guess who did the voice for this guy?  Chris Latta, also known as Cobra Commander and Starscream.  At least this guy was loyal to his boss, but still, if you remember that voice…and imagine him trying to do it scary…it worked.

But it doesn’t end there.  Oh no.  These shows were a joint effort between Hasbro and Marvel, remember?  So where’s the Hasbro part?  Right here!

You know, for kids

It might be hard to tell from that picture, but that toy was big enough to stick a GI Joe in the rib cage.  And this was what a lot of little boys asked their parents for for Christmas.

The 1980s folks.  It was trying to turn us all into demented basket cases.  Actually, mission accomplished!

 

An analysis of what “scary” means…by Cracked.com

Enjoy the Cracked.com crew explaining why scary stories are scary.  Includes IT, aliens, Godzilla, white guilt, and buttsecks.

 

4 Creepy Hidden Truths Behind Popular Scary Stories — powered by Cracked.com

 

Time for something spooky

True spooky story time.

I live at the back of an apartment complex.  Basically it’s a maze of streets that wind around buildings until you finally get to the very back stretch, which borders a small wooded lot that is owned by the city and technically a park, though no one really goes there.  There is a small office complex on the west side, a small pond and open field on the east, my apartment on the north and some warehouses on the south.  It’s actually very nice, and much better than living in any of the other buildings that just face each other.

My apartment is on the second floor, so I can see out into the woods from all of my windows.  One night I was sitting on my couch, watching something on TV, when I happened to look to my left out the window.  In the woods, maybe fifty yards in, and about twenty feet up, were two red glowing dots.  I grinned at the fact that they looked like eyes out there in the woods, but clearly had to be traffic lights from the other side of the office complex.  I paid them no more attention and later, after I had shifted on the couch, I couldn’t see them any more.

I noticed the “eyes” in the woods several more times, always when I was on a specific end of the couch, and as always I figured they were traffic lights.

About two weeks ago I came to a realization.  The lights in the woods were always red.  They didn’t change to yellow or green, and they didn’t flash.  They just burned constantly red, like two specks of color in the black night.  I decided to grab my cell phone and take a picture. I couldn’t tell for sure if I got them, but I held the phone up and clicked the camera button.  As I fiddled with the phone to send the pic to my email account so I could blow it up on my laptop, I noticed that the red dots were gone.

The picture appeared in my email and I opened it up with the standard Windows 7 image browser.  I could see the dark patch of the woods through the window, and there were the two red lights.  I zoomed in a few times, but all I could tell was that they were red dots, nothing else.  I had them centered on my laptop screen and looked up to see if I could find them in the dark outside the window again.  No luck.  I looked back to my laptop…

…and the dots had moved.  They were closer to the top of the screen.  They had been centered, almost perfectly, but now they were closer to the top, almost like a pair of eyes looking up.  I figured I’d just bumped it or something, so I moved them down closer to the center, stood up and went to the kitchen to get a soda.  When I got back, the red dots were more to the right, in the direction of the kitchen, as if they were following me.  I shook my head, left the laptop where it was on the coffee table in front of the couch, and went to find a DVD to watch from the case on the opposite side of the couch.  I looked up and the dots were on the left side now.

I blinked, looked again, but definitely the red splotches seemed to have moved.  I felt a bit of a cold chill run down my spine, but I figured it had to just be either my imagination or maybe something funky with the image viewer.  I put the DVD in and sat back on the couch.  The lights were centered on the screen again.  I must have imagined it all.  I looked around for the DVD remote and saw it on top of a pile of notebooks under the coffee table.  I reached down and snagged it, and when I looked up the image was zoomed in several more times, the red dots looking like pixelated eyes staring angrily at me.

I quickly closed the image file and deleted it from my desktop.  For good measure, I deleted the email with it attached and the image from my phone.  That was, as I said, about two weeks ago.  I  haven’t seen the lights out in the woods since.  But despite emptying my trash bin on my laptop a couple of times since then, the image file is still there.  I swear I’ve deleted it, but it keeps coming back.  I’m kind of afraid to open it.  I don’t know what would be in that picture now, and I don’t know if opening it would let it go back to the woods where it came from.

As I write this the file is sitting just under this window…but it seems to be bleeding through, the icon that is.  Like I could click it now.  I wonder what would happen. Maybe I’ll tr