In the spring of 1993, I noticed a rough scaly patch developing behind one of my ears. At the time, I didn’t worry too much about it, thinking it was something to do with my glasses chafing.
The patch was soon joined by another in the folds of my other ear and slowly they began to spread upwards and round, into my scalp and across my brows. Alarmed, I went to the doctors for a chat.
It’s been funny old weather for the past week. Thin bands of rain clouds shooting across the country, dousing us in a downpour while a low sun bathes us in light.
Which makes for top rainbow weather, of course, and a doozy arched over the back garden earlier this week. Not a double, sadly, but I think a full ‘bow is just about as good.
The evil child has been a powerful symbol in horror and fantastic fiction for decades. The Children Of The Damned. The Children Of The Corn. The Others. Most boys called Damian.
To that roster we can finally add Kevin Katchadorian. In Lionel Shriber’s acclaimed novel, he stalked the pages while never really springing out at us. The book’s structure, built as a series of letters, provided a sense of distance from him. That may have been a kindness. Thanks to the extraordinary work of director Lynne Ramsey and the actor she chose to play Kevin, Ezra Miller, we are drawn uncomfortably close to Kevin. Close enough to see the fire rising in his eyes.
The story is simple, and resonant. Told through the eyes of Kevin’s mother Eva, we are led through Kevin’s life, and how from the very beginning he was somehow … different. Incapable of love. Manipulative, to an extent that Machiavelli would have admired. Utterly free from morals, from any iota of empathy with the world. A monster.
Ramsey plays with time, sliding us back and forth along the eighteen years from Kevin’s birth to the awful event that he engineers to define himself. We realise early on what he has done, but the director is canny enough to keep one big shock from us until the end. Meanwhile, the monster grows. Throughout, we see Kevin as Eva sees him. In some ways, she is the only person who Kevin chooses to be honest with. With her, he doesn’t hide his true state. With her, he is always truthful.
The film is soaked in crimson, scarlet, bloody washes saturating the screen. It’s the most painterly film I’ve seen in a long time, giallo-garish, lush as an Argento. Ramsey, her DoP Seamus McGarvey and colourist Stuart Fyvie have done extraordinary work here, flooding the screen with coloured light.
The performances throughout are equally remarkable. Ezra Miller, and the boys that play him as a child, create a brooding, demonic presence. A trickster, charming when he needs to be, terrible when the mask slips. Tilda Swinton shines through the horror, bruised, wounded yet never defeated. The final meeting between her and her son tells you everything you need to know about a mother’s love for her son, no matter what the cost. Thinking about it, it also tells you why she stays in a town that despises her – and why, to a certain extent, she is blamed for Kevin’s actions. The greatest horror of all is how unconditional, how illogical, how unbreakable that love can be.
2011 is becoming a bumper year for horrors with strong central female characters, and to my mind We Need To Talk About Kevin fits right in with films like The Skin I Live In and The Woman. These are films that deal with aspects of womanhood, and the darkness at the core of that state. WNTTAK is by far the subtlest of these, keeping the nastiness largely off screen. Yet it still has the power to shock and chill, largely because Ramsey builds a skewed, disturbing atmosphere and allows our imagination to do the rest. This is an astonishing achievement from film-makers at the top of their game. You need to see We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Yes, it was late, and yes I was tired, and yes I had been drinking. And there is certainly an element of pareidolia (the phenomenon where we see faces in clouds and Jesus in a bit of toast) in what I saw.
So I have to take comfort in the fact that the washing instructions on our new hand towel aren’t really telling me to OBEY.
Because gods know, that’s all I can see now when I look at that tag.
For any horror fan that knows the genre, The Exorcist is the alpha and the omega. A dark, brutal trap of a film, and one of the few whose reputation remains unsullied and potent.
But the book, published in 1971, came first. A sensation on it’s release, a large part of the success of William Friedkin’s adaptation is due to how closely it cleaves to the original story. Now a fortieth-anniversary edition has been brought out, with tweaks and tidying by William Peter Blatty – an excuse, as he says in the foreword, to polish “the rhythms of the dialogue and prose throughout.” The original, as he admits, was rushed, and subject to editorial meddling. We have been presented with something closer to a director’s cut. Although fear not – there’s no George Lucas-style redecoration here.
Blatty began his writing career as a screenwriter, and those skills are obvious in the book. The story moves like a runaway train, at a pace that becomes ever more hectic. The purple prose that he uses in the prologue, set in Northern Iraq, is something of a red herring – the main body of the book uses a cool, distant style. Reportage that only makes the horrifying events in the book that bit more awful.
Do I need to tell the story? In broad strokes: actress Chris McNeil lives in a rambling house in a suburb of Washington with her daughter, Regan. The girl, a sweet-natured creature, starts to talk about an imaginary friend, Captain Howdy. The good captain gradually takes over, slipping into Regan as if he was shrugging on a suit. Howdy is no friend. Regan has become possessed by a demon.
The book is soaked from the first lines in a thick sense of dread. We’re never sure where Howdy comes from. A relic bearing his likeness is unearthed at the Iraqi dig that begins the book. Regan has been playing with a Ouija board. It’s never clear. It doesn’t need to be. All we need to know is that the girl has been taken, and that she will not be easily recovered.
In some ways, the story unfolds like a police procedural as Chris, and later the priest who becomes entangled in the case, the conflicted Damian Karras, try to find evidence that Regan is sick, suffering from delusions, somehow self-hypnotised. Like Sherlock Holmes, they eliminate the impossible to reach the incredible truth. The exorcist of the title, the haunted Father Merrin, only appears three-quarters of the way through the book. Before then we, like Chris and Father Karras, are struggling to make sense of the senseless.
The book still holds the ability to shock and unsettle. Sweet Regan’s transformation (is it any coincidence that her nickname is Rags? Howdy treats her as a puppet, throwing her around like a rag doll) is rapid and terrible, her foul language a shock when we have witnessed how her mother can’t even swear properly. Blatty’s clear, uncoloured description of what the possession is doing to Regan brings us to horror and revulsion in equal measure. We are rarely out of the Georgetown house, and as the focus becomes more claustrophobic, the tension builds. When Merrin arrives, in a moment that is the most memorable image of the film, the relief is palpable. But the worst is yet to come.
Blatty delivers his shocks like a swordsman’s coup de grace, leaving them to the end of a chapter, often in the space of one line. Then away again, leaving the resonance of what we’ve just read to clatter like a man thrown down a set of steps. It’s key to the pacing of the book. He doesn’t dwell on the horror. He knows that we’re more than capable of doing that ourselves.
The Exorcist remains a remarkable achievement in modern horror, a book that transcends any danger of pulpy exploitation in favour of something much darker and richer. Seen at the time as harsh commentary on the corruption of the American soul during Vietnam, it stands today as an allegory on the ugliness that lurks in everyone, and how it can infect even the most innocent of victims.
Howdy may be otherworldly, but he takes a lot of his material from the people around him. The book digs more deeply into the characters than the film can, drawing you more deeply into their suffering, into their conflicts, and into the awful understanding that is The Exorcist’s black heart. The sacrifice at the end of the book is almost inevitable – you can see it coming from page one. Evil has a price that has to be paid before any form of salvation can be reached.
I love a wedding. Any excuse to get dressed up and drink too much and dance like a fool. Friday saw us at a lovely hotel in the heartlands of the country, at the nuptials of TLC’s mum and her long-time beau.
It was one of the most joyful occasions I’ve ever been to, and I’ve not laughed so hard or so freely at a social occasion in a long time. The bride was consumed in fits of giggles through the ceremony, and I’m still not convinced that she repeated all the vows. Once the papers were signed, the bride and groom danced back down the aisle (I’m taking the blame for that; I did, after all, show them the JK Wedding Dance). The first dance was livened up by the bride going a-over-t during an attempt at a pirhouette. And I don’t even think she’d been drinking that much up to that point.
And yes we danced and yes we drank and yes we laughed. And yes we chased off a bunch of wedding crashers and yes we all had headaches the next morning. But oh my word, you want something like that to be memorable, and this is a wedding that will live on for quite some time. You sometimes forget that a solemn occasion doesn’t have to be without joy.
Pam, Joe, the future is yours. That’s one hell of a way to kick it off.
So, after our last post, this popped into my inbox. That damned elusive DocoBanksy has been busy with Final Cut, it seems. Our adventures in the tunnels of Leake Street, condensed into thirty seconds. And it honestly felt like it went that quickly as well…
Making graffiti is like playing the guitar. It’s very easy to pick up and do very, very badly. Getting it right and creating something that people might find pleasant to the eye takes a lot of skill and practice. I discovered this for myself when that damned elusive DocoBanksy lured me down to the free-spray zone at Leake Street, near Waterloo, to do a bit of promo work for his film.
Turns out he had a much more realistic idea of his skill level and the likely end result than I did.
Continue reading Paint Under Skin: On Becoming A Graffiti Artist
Dark fictions flourish in dark times. As we lurch from financial crisis to social meltdown, our reading habits change and our idea of what constitutes light relief gains some weight. This is a simple truth that the editors of new anthology title Noir Nation understand all too clearly. It’s the perfect time to launch, and the premiere issue is stuffed as full of hardboiled treats as an old fashioned sweetie shop.
A well-curated genre collection will take pleasure in the display of a wide range of voices, opinions and stories. Noir Nation hits all the buttons hard. It’s broad, wide and deep in scope, which suits a journal with a truly international remit. Standout stories for me include Tristan Davies “Surgeons”, which introduces us to a doctor who makes Gregory House look like that nice English actor Hugh Laurie, and RF Warner’s “Dog Of A Different Breed”, the story of a drug run gone bad, an unfortunate incident with a dog, and a serial killer with a yen for poetry and gameplay.
Speaking of poetry, there’s also room for a piece by Bonnie Parker. Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie Parker. Seems like she could shoot better than she could sling a rhyme, but it’s a fascinating curio from a famous gun moll.
The first ish also gives us a fascinating discussion on what constitutes contemporary noir (Alan Ward Thomas, the Eastern Hemisphere editor, pulls together a fascinating take that includes transhumanist SF, Alvin Toffler-style future shock, Cubism and Jung) and a forum on whether the genre has a moral compass. The jury’s out on that one, but there are equally compelling arguments for and against.
The one misfire is Jon Danko and Danda’s graphic novel, Fired On Deadline. It’s muddled, and text-heavy, with none of the bite of the prose pieces. It also, at least in my preview copy, looked as if it had been inserted at too low a resolution, leading to blurry, rasterised artwork. That’s a real shame, considering my predilections. It also does Danda’s lovely expressionistic art (he did the cover, shown above, which is a much better showcase of his talents) no justice. It’s apparently the first part of a larger work, and I’d be interested to see where Danko and Danda take the idea of Flamenco Noir. But for now at least, the whole thing looks like something of an afterthought.
But that’s a minor quibble regarding a strong anthology bulging with good stuff. You can pick it up at the Kindle Store and still get change from a poorly cephalopod. Noir Nation shows a genre that is in very rude health indeed. Live and goddam kicking.
The Beeranauts have been pretty quiet this year. The Great British Beer Festival had to manage without us, and it was a minor contingent that made it to the London Drinker gathering back in the spring. Apart from that, nish since Battersea. A bit of a poor show, frankly.
We made up for that on Friday, with a trip up to Nottingham for the Robin Hood Festival. Held in the grounds of lovely Nottingham Castle, it’s perhaps the biggest British Beer Festival after the Earl’s Court spectacular. And it’s far and away the best.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 