Horror Show

[RivkahChaya]

"The Car." Oh yeah, I remember that one too. A big black sedan with no driver that is possessed by the Devil and goes around running over people. Can't drive across holy ground so you're safe to hide in a cemetery. Bullets bounced off it. Driver's door flew opened suddenly to knock down the guy trying to shoot it. Defeated in the end, if I recall correctly, by being led to drive off a cliff that had been rigged with dynamite that then detonated and brought the whole cliff face collapsing down upon it. Loved it as a kid. If I saw it today, I'm sure I would laugh.

Do you mean Christine? I didn't make it all the way through that film, so I can't remember if it was a sedan or a sports car, but I'm pretty sure it was black.

It was Stephen King, and to be honest, I've not read his books much. I read Dolores Claiborne, two of the novellas in Different Seasons, and a couple of short stories, but I've never made it through one of his really long novels, in spite of the fact that his writing is pretty tight, and they start off well. I just never identify with his characters. I thought the idea at the beginning of Gerald's Game was great, but once the initial problem was resolved, I was done with it.

His books are always a struggle to bring to screen. I loved Dolores Claiborne (the movie), but the pairing of Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh really couldn't miss, I don't think, and Stand by Me was great, mainly because Rob Reiner trusted his child actors, and didn't over-direct them, and then, it was a suspense film, but not a monster movie, or a supernatural story. In spite of some really gross stuff in King, I think he puts some things in them that no special effects creator can make, which can compete with what he manages to conjure up in reader's minds.

Come to think of it, his other successful films, like Misery haven't been supernatural, and Carrie saved it to the end. (And to be honest, I know that film was well-received, but I didn't like it much myself.)

[Magpie]

"The Car." Oh yeah, I remember that one too. A big black sedan with no driver that is possessed by the Devil and goes around running over people. Can't drive across holy ground so you're safe to hide in a cemetery. Bullets bounced off it. Driver's door flew opened suddenly to knock down the guy trying to shoot it. Defeated in the end, if I recall correctly, by being led to drive off a cliff that had been rigged with dynamite that then detonated and brought the whole cliff face collapsing down upon it. Loved it as a kid. If I saw it today, I'm sure I would laugh.

The bizarre thing about The Car is that everyone seems to remember it being a lot more gory that it actually was. It was a TV movie, after all, so it didn't really show anything too gross.

[Magpie]

Guilty please "Death Ship" with George Kennedy and Richard Crenna.

Never read a review that didn't completely slam this movie, but I enjoyed it (In a "so stupid it's fun" kind of way)

I personally this "Ghost Ship" was a loose, uncredited remake of it (and I enjoyed that one too)

[kensei]

Do you mean Christine? I didn't make it all the way through that film, so I can't remember if it was a sedan or a sports car, but I'm pretty sure it was black.

It was Stephen King, and to be honest, I've not read his books much. I read Dolores Claiborne, two of the novellas in Different Seasons, and a couple of short stories, but I've never made it through one of his really long novels, in spite of the fact that his writing is pretty tight, and they start off well. I just never identify with his characters. I thought the idea at the beginning of Gerald's Game was great, but once the initial problem was resolved, I was done with it.

His books are always a struggle to bring to screen. I loved Dolores Claiborne (the movie), but the pairing of Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh really couldn't miss, I don't think, and Stand by Me was great, mainly because Rob Reiner trusted his child actors, and didn't over-direct them, and then, it was a suspense film, but not a monster movie, or a supernatural story. In spite of some really gross stuff in King, I think he puts some things in them that no special effects creator can make, which can compete with what he manages to conjure up in reader's minds.

Come to think of it, his other successful films, like Misery haven't been supernatural, and Carrie saved it to the end. (And to be honest, I know that film was well-received, but I didn't like it much myself.)

No no, not "Christine," but "The Car" which was referenced by Scorpio up in post #87, 1977 starring James Brolin. Big black nondescript sedan with no driver. Christine was 1983 and the car was a red '58 Plymouth Fury that required an owner for the demon within it to be released. It could operate driverless but primarily the demon possessed the owner. That was a genuinely good movie, whereas "The Car" pretty much sucked.

Love Stephen King, sporadically at least. Agreed that Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh together in "Dolores Claiborne" were awesome, though that's not a horror film really. One of my favorites King films is "Silver Bullet" which came from the novella "Cycle of the Werewolf." Though it's a pretty big cheese fest, I just like werewolves. Plus, Megan Follows at that young age was heartbreakingly cute, Cory Haim was still alive and had yet to descend into drugs, and Gary Busey is always entertaining no matter if he's acting or just being himself.

[Scorpio]

I think King regards himself primarily as a storyteller, and it shows in the movies.
A lot of directors are ignorant of the story tellers art, and the result is often way to literal and heavy handed.
DePalma and Kubrick possessed enough ability to convert King's engaging but often self indulgent style into pure cinema.

[RivkahChaya]

I think King regards himself primarily as a storyteller, and it shows in the movies.
A lot of directors are ignorant of the story tellers art, and the result is often way to literal and heavy handed.
DePalma and Kubrick possessed enough ability to convert King's engaging but often self indulgent style into pure cinema.

I have never liked the movie The Shining, but then I'm not much of a fan of Kubrick. I recognize that what he does, he does well, it just isn't my taste.

[SPOILERS, if you aren't familiar with The Shining, and don't want to be]

Apparently, Stephen King didn't like the choice of Jack Nicholson for the main role, because he said that from the very beginning, you just look at him, and you know he's going to go crazy-- which is pretty much true of Nicholson, no matter what movie he is in, unless he starts out already crazy.

King wanted Michael Moriarty for the role, someone who would come across so sane and sober, that it'd be a shock later when he went crazy, and you would believe there had to be a supernatural, or some outside force, at work, because a guy like that doesn't just go off the deep end, he has to be pushed (yes, I realize the character was already an alcoholic, but not all alcoholics are violent or even detectably altered, if they have been drinking for a long time, but they are generally more suggestible than sober people.)

Michael Moriarty is the guy who played Ben Stone, the first ADA on Law & Order (the first US version). Tall, blonde, nondescript, slow-spoken, and born to play a guy with the last name "Stone." He plays immutable characters a lot, people who, even when they are deeply moved, show it through quite action, not through rending their garments. It would have been shocking and disturbing to see him become an ax-murderer.

Also, he would have been believable with Shelley Duvall.

[Scorpio]

Guilty please "Death Ship" with George Kennedy and Richard Crenna.

Never read a review that didn't completely slam this movie, but I enjoyed it (In a "so stupid it's fun" kind of way)

I personally this "Ghost Ship" was a loose, uncredited remake of it (and I enjoyed that one too)

I saw Death Ship an age ago. I seem to remember Nazi's in it for some reason.

[kensei]

I'd like to comment on monsters from folklore- i.e. ones that have been believed in and told of in supposedly true stories from the past- as they have been depicted in horror movies. I honestly and with great consternation do not understand why film studios don't seem capable of adapting anything from history without embelishing the hell out of it. They've certainly never turned out an accurate Jack the Ripper movie and there's nothing supernatural about that. Throw in that extra element and dramatic license just goes all over the place.

Vampires in folklore were reanimated corpses who fed on the blood of the living. They were partially decayed, hideously ugly, foul smelling, and lacking any personality whatsoever for the identity they'd possessed in life was completely gone. Rarely if ever did they even speak. They were empty shells, mindless parasites. Isn't that pretty darn scary? But name one vampire movie that has ever presented them that way. There aren't any. I guess the one that came closest was the first one, "Nosferatu." Then along came Dracula, and for a long time writers seemed to think that all vampires needed to look and dress like him. They added charm to the vampire, and the idea that he could try to masquerade as a normal person. Anne Rice put her personal spin on that and virtually invented the Goth culture, and then "Twilight" actually turned vampires into romantic, heroic good guys. WTF? If the people of the 16th century who believed in real vampires could have seen forward in time they would have thought we were absolutely insane. Folklore tends to state that the way to destroy a vampire has to involve destroying its heart, and often also cutting off its head. It didn't specify a wooden stake as many movies have. Notice how in the most faithful interpretations of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire is killed with knives, not wooden stakes.

Then there is the werewolf, also once widely believed in. Vampires, being the undead, could only be dealt with in that form, but many living people were tried and executed as being werewolves. Most of the case histories describe people who turned into wolves that looked just like regular wolves, and then ran around making fatal nuisances of themselves and eating people. Sometimes a little larger than usual, sometimes lacking a tail, but otherwise indistinguishable from a regular wolf. This actually translated into other animals in various parts of the world, whatever was the most ferocious predator in each region. Africa had wereleopards. South America had werejaguars. Scandinavia had werebears. Etc. etc. Polynesia even had "shark men." But when Hollywood got hold of the shapeshifting legend, the limits of early technology produced the "Wolf Man," a two-legged beast rather than a four-legged one, and to this day that has never let go. Even with modern special effects, werewolves tend to be depicted as walking upright. That feature isn't completely absent from folklore, but it wasn't the norm. Ways to kill a werewolf in folklore tended to focus on how any wound the wolf suffered would then be seen on the corpse of the human after death, but the reliance on weapons of silver seen in movies was not entirely a creation of Hollywood. Some old stories do mention it, as well as fire, as being ways to kill a werewolf. But silver was also sometimes mentioned as a way to kill a vampire.

Finally, there is the zombie. In folklore, it is a product of Voodoo which is a religion comprised of a mixture of African tribal practices mixed with Roman Catholicism and practiced mainly in the nation of Haiti and various other places. A traditional zombie is a corpse reanimated through deliberate magical practices by a criminal voodoo magician, to be used as a slave for the purposes of-- whatever. Manual labor, murder, take your pick. In recent years there's been a lot written about how voodoo priests have faked all of this using poison from blowfish, sending someone into a coma so close to death that they are declared dead and buried. Then they are dug up, revived, and put into a trance and implied to be a zombie. I would call that a "fake zombie." A "real zombie" would be a genuine dead person risen by actual magic, if such actually exists. The proof would come over years, as a real zombie wouldn't age and a fake one would. But when HOLLYWOOD came along, they took the zombie in a completely fabricated direction. There were a paltry few early renditions of actual folklore such as "White Zombie," but apparently that wasn't exciting enough, because somehow zombies got turned into mindless reanimated corpses that had nothing to do with magic but who would rise en masse and go off on a mad crusade for "BRAINS!" The flesh-eating cannibal zombies of so very many movies now have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any supposedly real story that has ever been told about them. They never ate people in folklore, period. As for how to "kill" a zombie, i.e. return it to natural death, the movies instruct us to blow their heads off, whereas the old tales tell us to simply force them or trick them into swallowing some salt. That does the trick. The one time I have seen this used in fiction was in my very favorite episode of that 1970s classic t.v. show "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," a "monster of the week" show that ran for one season in 1974-75. Their zombie episode was actually pretty faithful to folklore, and pretty darn creepy.

[louisa]

.

King wanted Michael Moriarty for the role, someone who would come across so sane and sober, that it'd be a shock later when he went crazy, and you would believe there had to be a supernatural, or some outside force, at work, because a guy like that doesn't just go off the deep end, he has to be pushed (yes, I realize the character was already an alcoholic, but not all alcoholics are violent or even detectably altered, if they have been drinking for a long time, but they are generally more suggestible than sober people.)

Yes, I can Michael Moriarty in the role. I also think Christopher Walken might have been good.

[Magpie]

I saw Death Ship an age ago. I seem to remember Nazi's in it for some reason.

That's right--survivors of a cruise ship sinking run across what appears to be an abandoned tanker, but was actually a secret floating concentration camp from WW2.

[Magpie]

I think King regards himself primarily as a storyteller, and it shows in the movies.
A lot of directors are ignorant of the story tellers art, and the result is often way to literal and heavy handed.
DePalma and Kubrick possessed enough ability to convert King's engaging but often self indulgent style into pure cinema.

The first director to really get King "right" was David Cronenberg, with "The Dead Zone".

[Scorpio]

The first director to really get King "right" was David Cronenberg, with "The Dead Zone".

And the last director to make a good movie based upon a King novel was Frank Darabont. Rob Reiner also made a decent effort with
Misery.

[RivkahChaya]

I think the "silver bullet" thing had to do less with the silver, than that the bullet was made from some holy object, that had been blessed-- some cross, or candlestick, or cup use by a church was melted down to make the bullets, and that why they had the power of exorcism. Gold probably wasn't used, just because gold is so malleable, it would probably make really lousy bullets. Silver has been used as a symbol of purity before, too.

Oddly, there's a tiny amount of truth in it, in that metal in general, but silver in particular, is a hostile environment for germs, so people sharing a cup, like a communion cup, with wine in it (alcohol) at a church, are very unlikely to catch something from it. I'm sure that wasn't in the minds of people who were making silver bullets for werewolves, though.

It's certainly true that the disgusting fiends of legends are not like the vampires and werewolves in movies. Although, the Bela Lugosi Dracula is fairly off-putting, he's not a really likeable guy, and as far as the way he is dressed, the film was made in 1931, and he dresses in a coat and tails for the opera, which is appropriate, and then shows up in similar dress for a dinner, which is a little over-dressed compared to the other guests; it's almost too subtle, if you are watching the film 80 years later. The cut and style of his clothing is Victorian, while everyone else's evening clothes are 30's style, another thing that is lost on modern audiences.

Anne Rice wrote fetish fiction. There's nothing wrong with that, other than the rather disturbing fact that a lot of people who bought it did not seem to realize it was fetish fiction.

Twilight is fetish fiction for 12-year-olds, and there's no escaping the pedophilic subtext. The vampire may not look old, and may even be weirdly subverting Peter Pan, but if an adult man acts immature, says he "feels" like a child, and even sort of looks like one, albeit, he's much, much older, that just makes the pedophilia even creepier, and is still illegal.

How did they even get a marriage license? I had to show an ID, to prove I'm not trying to defraud, and because at least one of the people being issued the license has to be a state resident, and I'm sure that if you happen to look like you might be just barely old enough to get married, you have to show proof of age.

[Scorpio]

I think the "silver bullet" thing had to do less with the silver, than that the bullet was made from some holy object, that had been blessed-- some cross, or candlestick, or cup use by a church was melted down to make the bullets, and that why they had the power of exorcism. Gold probably wasn't used, just because gold is so malleable, it would probably make really lousy bullets. Silver has been used as a symbol of purity before, too.

Oddly, there's a tiny amount of truth in it, in that metal in general, but silver in particular, is a hostile environment for germs, so people sharing a cup, like a communion cup, with wine in it (alcohol) at a church, are very unlikely to catch something from it. I'm sure that wasn't in the minds of people who were making silver bullets for werewolves, though.

It's certainly true that the disgusting fiends of legends are not like the vampires and werewolves in movies. Although, the Bela Lugosi Dracula is fairly off-putting, he's not a really likeable guy, and as far as the way he is dressed, the film was made in 1931, and he dresses in a coat and tails for the opera, which is appropriate, and then shows up in similar dress for a dinner, which is a little over-dressed compared to the other guests; it's almost too subtle, if you are watching the film 80 years later. The cut and style of his clothing is Victorian, while everyone else's evening clothes are 30's style, another thing that is lost on modern audiences.

Anne Rice wrote fetish fiction. There's nothing wrong with that, other than the rather disturbing fact that a lot of people who bought it did not seem to realize it was fetish fiction.

Twilight is fetish fiction for 12-year-olds, and there's no escaping the pedophilic subtext. The vampire may not look old, and may even be weirdly subverting Peter Pan, but if an adult man acts immature, says he "feels" like a child, and even sort of looks like one, albeit, he's much, much older, that just makes the pedophilia even creepier, and is still illegal.

How did they even get a marriage license? I had to show an ID, to prove I'm not trying to defraud, and because at least one of the people being issued the license has to be a state resident, and I'm sure that if you happen to look like you might be just barely old enough to get married, you have to show proof of age.

I think the modern vampire image from Stoker onward is one big fetish; it would account for its popularity and longevity.

[kensei]

I think the "silver bullet" thing had to do less with the silver, than that the bullet was made from some holy object, that had been blessed-- some cross, or candlestick, or cup use by a church was melted down to make the bullets, and that why they had the power of exorcism. Gold probably wasn't used, just because gold is so malleable, it would probably make really lousy bullets. Silver has been used as a symbol of purity before, too.

.

There was a tv special a couple of years ago entitled "The Real Wolfman," which was a study of the Beast of Gevaudan killings in medieval France. Since "The Beast" that was thought by some to be a werewolf at the time was said to have been killed by a peasant hunter using silver bullets blessed by a priest when so many others, including soldiers, had failed to kill it with ordinary lead shot, the show conducted a forensics test on silver bullets. They found that silver doesn't fly straight at all and would present huge problems in accuracy. I won't go into all the related implications they explored. I'll just say that it made me think- wait a minute. If we are willing to consider the supernatural at all in this case, at least enough to try and debunk it, then what about the question of whether a holy blessing placed on a silver bullet that wouldn't ordinarily fly straight might miraculously make it fly straight and true? They didn't even address that.