The Bilchsteim, you know; huge, scaly, big antlers. You don't have those?

Too obsessed with The Avengers to think about horror movies. I could probably write about male objectification and the joy of the female gaze, though. Hmm. Thoughts.

This machine is there to please.

I'm obsessed with Porcupine Tree's album In Absentia. It kind of started with Dirty Knobs, actually -- okay, it started with Warren Ellis. 

Warren Ellis posted a link on his blog to an album... well, he put it best: "An eight-hour piece of ambient drone music broken into thirteen chapters. The album’s name, FIELD RECORDINGS FROM THE EDGE OF HELL, is such a perfectly fitting descriptor of the sound that I have little more to add. I’m only 90 minutes in and I swear I can hear organs playing from inside a pit." 

Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell, by Dirty Knobs, put me on the track of more unsettling ambient music. There were so many things about that appealed to me: beyond the obvious appeal to my morbid instincts, it also reminded me, in its documentary presentation of indescribable and inscrutable darkness, of the House of Leaves. Which is totally the kind of thing that makes my brain all wet and spicy. So when Boyfriend gave me a bunch of albums by his new favorite band, Porcupine Tree, and I discovered that they were to varying degrees ambient and creepifying, I was delighted. (It helped that I was in a play at the time that was also morbid and strange, about which I may expound further at some later point.) 

So In Absentia was from a period when they'd moved away from straight-up ambient, more towards a kind of prog-metal-ambient mutant beast thing? And there's murder and mutilation in there, though it's not necessarily obvious all the time. My favorite track is probably "Gravity Eyelids," which segues right into the instrumental "Wedding Nails." The former is as tender and delicate a song about molesting someone as has probably ever been written, but of course it's also got a thick, greasy layer of awfulness right underneath this film of beauty. Yearning and desire and hope and sorrow and fear all at once. And then "Wedding Nails" is a piece that sounds to me as much like murdering someone can be and still be music. It ends with this amazing ambient section, like a breath held in a cavernous place.

I'm partial to Fear of a Blank Planet as well, though that one is creepy in a less visceral, more civilized way. Still unsettling, but it has more to do with suburban alienation and teenage hopelessness and angst than, you know, murder and madness. I do recommend the band in general, though, for those times when you want something subtler than Rob Zombie but more intellectually disturbing.

Wherein I learn to appreciate some of my more tedious academic experiences.

Daisies. (Or Sedmikrásky, if you're pedantic.) A Czech film from the 60s. Apparently it's About Things, but really, I just enjoyed watching it. It's totally avant-garde, which can go either way with me: basically, I quite enjoy avant-garde films when they avoid tediousness, the great plague of movies that are About Things, avant-garde or otherwise. Like, this movie is like the opposite of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, another flick I had to watch for both of my college classes on women directors and feminist film theory.

Yes, I took the class twice -- once freshman year at Smith College, and once senior year, after transferring to Georgetown. The second time, I went in with a bit more of an open mind -- which may come as a shock to my Prof. G, my senior year teacher. The thing is, I was expecting freshman year to see Clueless and K19: The Widowmaker and, you know, Penny Marshall movies. I had it in mind that we'd be seeing the influence that women have wielded in Hollywood, talking about why there weren't more of us, that kind of thing. Instead, lots of avant-garde movies and lots of psychoanalytic theory. This was my very first exposure to film studies, so I was a little overwhelmed. Also I thought most of the theory we read was unbearably stupid. (Even 12 years and a Master's degree later, I still think so, which is probably why I don't have a PhD.)

The second time around, I mostly took it because I figured it would be easy -- I'd seen have the screenings and done half the readings on the syllabus in freshman year, because apparently this is how everybody teaches that class, at every school. I've got to say, one of my few regrets about not going into teaching is that I never get the chance to create a syllabus for Women Directors that has Penny Marshall and Amy Heckerling and Kathryn Bigelow.

(Prof. G made sure the class wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, and bless her for it. She is the only person in my academic career -- which included a "Performance & Culture" concentration at Georgetown that was all film, and an MA in "Media & Cultural Studies" at U Wisconsin-Madison -- to actually teach me cinematic textual analysis. And she thought my analysis of the genre blending and consequent psychosexual tensions in Near Dark was awesome. I should've followed her advice and done Screen Studies up in New York. Alas.)

But anyway. My point is, the "canon" of "women directors" movies is limited and largely unbearable, as a viewer. But there are a few gems that are rarely seen outside of those kinds of classes -- and there's probably some cause and effect there, but anyway -- that I highly recommend to people who want to see a movie instead of a political screed. Daughters of the Dust, The Ballad of Little Jo, Meshes of the Afternoon, Daises -- all are actual films before they are political statements. There's politics in there, certainly, but implicit in stories (as the political always is in life, at least when it really matters).

Daisies was my favorite, and it came up in my last post because it ends with the most fabulous, strangely appetizing food fight in cinema history. Up until then, though, it has lots of arresting, beautiful, absurd imagery. You'll want to go to Czechoslovakia in the 60s, which was certainly not as awesome as it looks in this movie. Anyway: come for the sensory experience, stay for the feminist discourse. It's a good time.

"It's not called 'The Wizard of Creeping Dread.'"

But yeah. Posting is hard. (Let's go shopping!)

So, the creators of The Wizard of Gore (I swear I'm not obsessed with that movie -- it's been about three years since I watched it, but it was actually just a recent re-watching that reminded me I have this blog and then I was like, dude, I should post there again. Anyway) mentioned that people asked them if the movie was going to be gory. According to the DVD commentary, the above title was their response. By way of saying, I've been thinking a lot lately about what I like about horror.

First there's gore. I do quite enjoy a nice splatterfest, drive-in style. But that's really not about scare so much as excess. I get the same thrill out of watching a splatter movie as I do from the food fight at the end of Daisies.* 

I have gotten a lot more into Creepy Things as opposed to straight-up horror movies. I've never been fond of jump scares and much preferred the disturbing and morbid, and I feel like movies are so reliant on the "building tension and building tension and building tension and BWAH!" cycle that I get a little frustrated with them. Like The Woman in Black? I feel like that's the kind of movie I'll need to see a couple of times to really appreciate, because I spent a lot of it with my head in my shirt going, "Ahhhhh something's going to jump out at me and if I keep holding my breath I will pass out." After we saw the movie, my companions and I joked for hours about BWAH SCARY LADY FACE! Because it got silly after a while. And my constitution is too sensitive to put up with the constant assaults on my heart rate, so I just check out after the seventh or eighth jump scare. And yet, Woman in Black has a gorgeous dark waterlogged aesthetic that I think I would enjoy if I could relax a little.

These days I spend a lot of time reading creepy stories, looking at creepy art, and listening to creepy music. I think I'll try to post about some of those things for a while, with women and horror film as a background thing. Consistency be damned! 

SO. I saw a movie a few months ago on Netflix streaming called Yellowbrickroad. With a twee title like that, I wasn't expecting much, but I was completely gripped by the movie by the end. I totally forgot about computering or whatever else I was planning to do at the same time and was enthralled. Gotta take issue with the sound recording -- bleagh. Glad the actors were good, otherwise I would have had no idea what was going on, because a lot of the dialogue is just totally submerged. And yeah, maybe there's some ripoffs from Blair Witch, but man. Honestly? Just as gripping, maybe moreso because real photography means you can actually see what's happening. It's kind of the standing definition of Creeping Dread for me now. So much atmosphere you could cut it with a knife. Really quite good. Must suggest it if you're looking for a couple of hours of tense, vague unpleasantness.

*Which, if you haven't seen it, is definitely worth a watch. I think I'll have to post about it next, horror be damned. 

I don't think I've mentioned -- most likely because I haven't posted since it came out -- how passionately and aggressively I hate the cover "art" for the Blu-Ray release of Near Dark. HAAAAAAATE. It is a blatant copy of the cover of Fucking Twilight, right down to inexplicably making Caleb gray and vampire-y and Mae pink and human-y -- i.e., it was created by someone who'd never seen the movie. I've rarely considered writing an angry letter about cover art, but my god does this inspire it. BLEAGH.

Just saw Cabin in the Woods. Jesus Galloping Christ that was good.