American Horror Story

This is a really good series. So far three seasons have come out, but a fourth is in the works. It is a horror series, and each season deals with a different theme often dealt with in the horror genre.

The first season was about a family that moved into a haunted house. At first, everything appears to be normal, but they are repeatedly warned that the house is bad news and that there have been many killings there. Strange things start to happen, and with each episode, we learn about a new ghost that is cursed to forever live in the house. We travel back and forth in time and discover what happened in the house in years past and why the friendly or angry spirits reside in the house. How they died. What will happen to the family currently living there I wonder?

The second season takes place in a 19th century insane asylum. A reporter goes into an asylum to report on a new resident there supposedly guilty of murder, and who is supposedly a sick serial killer who skins his victims, but she is then not allowed to leave. We see some of what life was like in those institutions at that time, complete with human experimentation, evil nuns, exorcisms, shock therapy, and more. Will this reporter ever be free? And will she encounter this brutal serial killer?

The third and most current season was about a coven of witches. Young girls with special abilities attend a school of magic to learn how to properly use their skills. At the same time, they must learn who the next supreme, or ruler, will be. We have the classic magical school genre here, but we also get to see some voodoo. This wasn't as scary as the other seasons, but was still worth the watch.

The upcoming season is called circus and will take place at... A circus.

The stories are all very well written and interesting, but what really stands out for me in this series is how the actors are recycled. The same actors reappear in every season, and the fascinating thing is that they play the same character. For example, in each season, Jessica Lang plays a woman was once powerful, but now that power is fading, and she has or does use sexuality to gain or wield that power. Sarah Paulson always plays a woman with a 'sight' and with latent potential not fully realized. She seems to be able to see things that others can't. Evan Peters is always on the search for a seemingly unattainable love, and ends up being some woman's tool. Lily Rabe always plays the innocent who is later corrupted, used, and destroyed by evil that she did not initially seek out. And so on.

It's a fascinatingly complex story that is well written, and has very interesting characters. Worth the watch.

Deathbed: The Bed That Eats (1977)

This is a gem, in the worst sense possible. If you were to get together with a group of friends, got very drunk, and wanted to watch something absolutely horrible that would make you all laugh, this might be on the list.

The premise of the movie is that a bed in an abandoned mansion is possessed by a demon spirit, and eats whatever or whoever it comes in contact with. The mansion is abandoned because the bed ate everyone in the house, and potentially everyone in the local area. Before you get your hopes up for hilarity, the bed cannot move on its own. It doesn't talk either. The only way that we the audience are able to understand what's going on with the bed it through the voice on the narrator, one of the bed's victims who did not completely die and is not trapped behind a drawing he made of the bed. The story takes off when three women come up to the house from the country to 'get away', and they come across this abandoned house, which is of course the logical place to spend the night. Slowly, the bed claims them one by one, but there is a problem with one of the girls, who, as the narrator tells us, remind the bed of its creation. Yes really. Eventually, the ghostly narrator tells the girl from behind the drawing, to create some ritual that will hopefully destroy the bed. Will anyone survive its evil comfort!?

This movie was so bad. First of all, the narrator has this very morose, almost bored British voice that clearly exists only to give the bed's 'thoughts' a voice. Throughout the movie, the narrator has a one-sided conversation with no one about what the bed is thinking, feeling, and doing. It crosses the line of ridiculous. The actors are all very bad. They don't get into character at all and are stiff and awkward, just saying lines rather than actually acting them.

The very worst of all is the bed though. It makes these awkward crunching and slurping noise when it's eating, or swallowing noises when it drinks. The way it eats people is to slowly have them sink down into the sheets, which apparently open up into some void, represented by this yellow foam. We then get to see whatever it's eaten in this liquidy, yellow limbo where they disintegrate in what we can only assume is a bed's equivalent to stomach acid. At the beginning of the movie (one of the worst parts) a young couple comes into the mansion to... have some fun, and the brought a picnic. While they're kissing, the bed sneakily takes their food and eats it... but then returns the left overs to the top of the bed. So an apple sinks into the bed, an apple core comes back up. A bucket of chicken sinks down, the bucket comes back up with chicken bones. But the bed seems to not be consistent, because it later eats things that are not even food and doesn't seem to mind.

I would not really recommend that you watch this alone. Not because it's a horror movie... but because if you don't have someone to laugh with, you will probably get bored about half way through. If that far.

Hansel and Gretel (2007)

I have to start off by admitting to not watching a lot of Korean produced media... this actually might be the first one I've watched, so that's where I'm coming from.

So the story takes its main elements from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, but some of the details are kind of twisted around. The main character is a guy with a sick mother and a pregnant girlfriend. He's on the road to visit his mother in the hospital when he has a fight with his girlfriend on the phone and ends up flipping his car over the side of the road into the forest. When he wakes up it's night-time and he has pretty bad cuts on his head, a strange girl also discovers him and leads him back to her house where he can rest for the night. When he gets to the house in the woods (called the house of happy children or something) he meets a very weird family consisting of a mother, a father, and three children. They all seem creepily happy, but there's something a little bit off. The parents show subtle signs of great anxiety bordering on fear, and the children seem to be almost acting out what they feel a happy family should be like. Another weird thing about this place is that his requests to be lead out of a mysteriously confusing forest are always pushed aside or ignored. Then one day the parents 'go out' for the day and never come back. A different couple is found walking through the woods, are brought back to the house, and seem to eerily fill the place the parents did. The guy, who they now refer to as uncle, watches in horror as all of this happens. As he wanders around the house and interacts with the kids a little more, he begins to uncover some disturbing secrets, confirming that these kids aren't at all what they seem to be, and neither is the place he's stuck in. The kids in turn also seem to grow more and more attached to him, making the possibility of his ever escaping them seem slimmer by the day. Will he ever find his way out!?

It's supposed to be a horror, but it is more suspenseful than anything else. There are some deviations from the original story. The main character is some 20-something guy instead of the children, and it is he that gets lost in the forest, not they. In fact it is the children and only the children who seem to be able to find their way around the forest, everyone else get's lost and always ends up back at the house. Also, there is no witch in the traditional sense. There is magic which is being manipulated, but it's not by any old woman. Breadcrumbs are used though, and there is some abuse. All in all it was actually pretty well done and is worth the watch.

I actually watched this whole thing on YouTube, it might be amongst the suggested videos listed with the trailer.

 

Killer Workout/ Aerobicide (1986)

This is one of those movies that's so bad it's almost good. The story is about this girl named Valerie, who after getting seriously burned all over her body in a freak tanning bed accident, changes her name to Rhonda and opens up a workout facility. All seems to be going well until her aerobic clients start getting mysteriously killed off. A lieutenant from out-of-town starts investigating the case eventually starts to suspect Rhonda is responsible for the killings, but various incidents interfere with her arrest. At the end of the movie the killer walks free.

The story wasn't so bad. It actually sounded kind of humorous, and who doesn't like a cheesy slasher from the 80's. I think that only especially bad thing in the film was the lieutenant's acting. He was always properly scowling and suspicious, like a good one-dimensional cop should be, but he'd make these eye-rollingly worthy jumps of logic. When he suspects someone as the killer you will know because he will actually start telling that person in a conspiratorial way that he or she is guilty. The funniest of these are when he starts suspecting Rhonda and find out that she was badly burned. He then says to her that she was the killer because she had to see all of these beautiful bodies when she would always have to hide her own, and that the sight of her body would make any man sick to his stomach. He doesn't have any evidence (and never does in any of his accusations) but because he's definite that anyone that ugly would never be able to live happily he arrests her. Also funny on her part, when he does accuse her she gets mad and flashes him her burnt chest screaming 'is this what you wanted to see?'. But yes, poorly written and acted.

Besides the poor dialogue there were basically two components to this movie, people getting killed by a hand without a body, and zooming in on the butts and breasts of the girls while they're doing their workouts in revealing clothing. Definitely not a classic of its time, but it is pretty fun to watch if you're over the age of majority.

Ginger Snaps (2003)

I delayed watching Ginger Snaps for years because of the DVD cover. It gave me the impression of some really cheesy 90's b movie and I didn't want to waste the time. But. A friend strongly recommended that I watch it, and thank god I did. This is one of the best paranormal movies I've seen.

The story is about two sisters and one night walking home, the elder, Ginger, gets bitten by a 'dog'. Slowly the bitten sister begins to change, in a social sense as well as a physical sense. She begins taking an interest in a boy she and her sister previously looked down upon, she distances herself from her sister, Brigitte, with whom she shared a very close bond before the bite, and she even experiments with drugs. In addition to this, her hair begins to change colour and she grows more of it all over her body. She even grows a tail. Brigitte becomes concerned and looks into many possibilities, one of which is that her older sister was bitten by and is now changing into a werewolf. She then goes about trying to find a cure, while having to deal with Ginger, who is getting cravings for blood and is changing into something that is less and less like the sister she was once so close with.

What makes this movie different than a lot of other paranormal horrors is that there is a really strong feminine voice present in both of the sisters. Other than Buffy, women play the wilting heroine in horrors, and in a lot of other genres as well. Not so in this movie. Ginger has a very powerful personality throughout the whole movie. Even before the change, she'd stick up for Brigitte when she got picked on and would talk back to people who would speak against either her or her sister. After the change she exuded an even more pronounced air of self- confidence. she doesn't show doubt. Brigitte on the other hand at first seems very timid and meek, which she might be, Brigitte displays an inner strength that ginger lacks. She resists the temptation of power, which she would get if Ginger bit her and she turned into a werewolf. She seems like a follower at the beginning, but she's just loyal.

Something else that makes this movie interesting is that it's an allegory of puberty for girls. After Ginger gets bitten, she also gets her period for the first time. Then when she is reacting weird to being bitten by a werewolf, adults just assume she's acting so abnormal because 'its that time of the month' instead of seeing it for what it is. It's a great social commentary on how society tends to deal with women as something foreign and potentially scary, especially around menstruation. The funny thing was that it was women voicing these views. The mom just fluffs off Ginger's moody behaviour as 'growing up', and the school nurse does the same thing when Ginger tells her about her symptoms. All of the Ginger Snaps movies have some sort of feminist theme if you look for it, but this one is the most blatant and deals most directly with how as a society we choose to perceive women as foreign, evil, and abnormal.

Even without the allegorical reference this was an awesome movie. It was fast-paced and suspenseful. On my top five list for paranormal movies of all time!

Goth by Otsuichi

I really enjoyed this manga, it's one of my favourites. It has something of a morbid story line, focused around various cases of murder... but I wouldn't say it's primarily a murder mystery. There is definitely that aspect to the story, but because the main characters react as they do to these murders.. well lets say that the death helps to set the mood of the story more than drive plot (at the beginning of the story anyways). Both main characters have some connection to an obsession to death and are drawn to various morbid activity throughout the story. There is only one or two really graphic pictures, for the most part it's just the concepts that are kind of gruesome, and because of that the subject matter isn't as repulsive as it would be if the story was all guts and gore. It's more intriguing that repulsive, and in a dark kind of way you always want to know what happens next.
 
Something else that's kind of interesting about this story is how the character relationships are set up. I'll start of by saying in no way is this a romance... it's the opposite, but the way in which the characters relate to each other in conjunction with how the story progresses is reminiscent of a romance. The two main characters are a boy and a girl, the story is mostly narrated by the boy though, the girl always seems distant in this sense, as if we're watching her. Even the part where the girl is telling us about her past we see her through her eyes as something foreign... so we never really get into her head.
 
The boy is obsessed with death though. He was first drawn to the girl because he wanted to kill her (or wanted her hands), and for the rest of the story the girl and boy are what one could consider as friendship. Throughout the story though he's interested in her death, not plotting it per say, but interested in the possibility. The girl always seems to attract people who want to kill her and the boy always shows up, and at one part fights someone because he wants to be the one to kill her. It is kind of like a romance in that the boy is so obsessed with the girl, or the part of the story the readers are shown he is anyway... but just to restate, this isn't a romance.
 
The art is pretty nice and goes with the over all mood. I'm glad it's getting published in English.