Posts Tagged horror
To Look Like Superman
Every week, the internet selects a zany news report to pass around like an infectious yawn, and this week it was Herbert Chavez. He loves Superman so much he’s had multiple plastic surgeries in order to look more like his hero.
Buzzfeed summed it up like this: “So this is Herbert Chavez, who looks normal and not at all creepy. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Bizarro would be proud.) Andy Khouri, much more sympathetically, described it as an “unsettling quest” symptomatic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. “It is of course within this man’s rights to alter his body in any way he sees fit,” he writes, “but it’s not hard to imagine the Man of Steel disapproving of Chavez’s actions.”
Ignoring empathy for a moment – sorry, Superman – this makes me think about Superman’s face. All the faces of comic book superheroes look wildly different depending on which artist happens to be drawing them. And I asked last year if we were willing to accept the ever-changing facial features of superheroes “because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?”
But Superman isn’t a human being with a human face, caricatured onto the comic book page. The page is where he was born. Pencil and ink are his origin story; his planet Krypton. So what, in essence, does this Superman look like? He has a square jaw. A cleft chin. A spit-curl. Dark hair, white skin. That’s about it. Everything else can change on whim.
I’ve always wondered why Hollywood’s obsession with plastic surgery is only ever used to look young. One day, an actor will go under the knife to give themselves new emotive abilities: anime-sized eyes for augmented empathy, or expanded tear ducts to better gush during tragic third acts…
Writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo explored this idea in their fantastic mid-90s horror comic Face. It’s the story of David, a plastic surgeon who is summoned to perform surgery on an aged, reclusive artist named Andrew Sphinx. But Sphinx, who was a personal friend of Picasso, wants something different from the surgery. Something a little more… cubist.
If someone wants to look like Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain or Brandon Routh – sure, that’s one thing. Truly resembling the comic book Superman, though, is something else. You’d need to make your nose into two quick strokes, like an upside down seven, and abstract your eyes into featureless circles attached to the eyebrows above.
Otherwise, like Andrew Sphinx says to his surgeon: “You’re still stuck in classical realism, and you’re not even aware of it.”
Julia’s Eyes: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of new Spanish horror Julia’s Eyes from the current issue of triple j magazine. I’ve decided I like it even more since I wrote this. A few of the setpieces are still rattling around in my head, and it’s tone reminded me a little of The Haunting…
JULIA’S EYES
Director: Guillem Morales
Starring: Belén Rueda, Lluís Homar
Country: Spain
I’m wary when I see a filmmaker “presenting” another’s film. I figure it usually just means trading a famous name on the poster for a giant-sized cheque. So far, though, Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) has managed to get two great Spanish horror films a wider release. First there was the excellent ghost story The Orphanage, and now comes Julia’s Eyes.
Belén Rueda plays twins: one who’s killed in mysterious (and, uh, fairly terrifying) circumstances, and her sister who becomes obsessed with uncovering what happened. Both suffer from degenerative blindness that gets worse with fear-induced stress. Julia’s Eyes isn’t remotely concerned with its mystery making sense. It’s bloody fantastic, though, at setting up smart, scary setpieces. Is there someone in the house? Why can’t I see his face? Some of its stylistic gimmicks would’ve failed in lesser hands, but here they’re used to make you feel like you’re going mad.
Julia’s Eyes isn’t as tight as The Orphanage, but they’re both great, old-school rollercoasters, genuinely scary and genuinely fun.
Other reviews this month: Get Low in cinemas; Howl and Unstoppable on DVD.
Issue #51 on sale now.
Apologising to Laura Palmer
This is an extended remix of half my presentation from last week’s Twin Peaks nine-hour marathon at ACMI. I was especially gratified to demand – and receive – a rousing round of applause for the regularly ignored Mark Frost, too.
Did you see the Twin Peaks homage-slash-reunion on this week’s episode of Psych?
The fact that it’s so odd to Peaks’ actors, all grown up, shows how few have had successful post-Peaks careers. Kyle MacLachlan might’ve been on Sex and The City and Desperate Housewives, but it’s always a little sad to see Agent Cooper playing these neutered, neurotic characters. Ray Wise has fared better, with memorable roles including the Devil himself on short-lived slacker comedy Reaper.
Sometimes this curse that follows cult TV stars can almost seem like a gift to that show’s fans; it lets the characters freeze, unaging, with the men and women who embodied them tucked out of the public eye like they’re trapped in Dorian Gray’s attic.
The fact that the New York Times considered this Psych episode newsworthy shows how Twin Peaks still circulates strongly through popular culture. Recently, there have been a bunch of twenty-years-later articles, all unearthing fun facts about the show; like the fact that it was David Lynch himself who placed the sand, grain by grain, on Sheryl Lee’s face for the infamous ‘wrapped in plastic’ moment.
She said: “It was a great learning experience playing a corpse. I got to be a sponge and soak up everything.” I always wished Sheryl Lee – as Laura Palmer, and later, her cousin Maddie – deserved to be bestowed the status of full-blown Scream Queen, equal to Fay Wray or Jamie Lee Curtis.
But I’ve also made the case – in print, no less – that Twin Peaks is a much more satisfying show if you see it as a soap opera, and not a mystery. Laura is just a reason to kick off the plot. She gives some characters something to hide and others something to uncover. Sure, we’re told Laura is “full of secrets” – but when we look deeply into her eyes on video tape, it’s not to see into her soul. It’s just to see the reflection of something else in the same scene.
What if Laura’s not just wrapped in plastic, but made of plastic, too?
Today, though, I think I’ve changed my mind, and misjudged Laura Palmer by labelling her an easy narrative excuse. The follow-up movie Fire Walk With Me (infamously booed on its premiere at Cannes) is a Herculean attempt to turn Laura back into a human being. It acts as a kind of retroactive apology for how Laura was treated throughout the show.
Fire Walk With Me begins with the destruction of a television set; a not exactly subtle way of violently highlighting that what you’re about to watch will be different than anything you saw on TV. While Twin Peaks was regularly terrifying – in fact, I still believe it’s the most frightening thing to ever appear on network TV – the movie is relentless. It’s the kind of film that leaves you wanting a shower afterwards.
(I’m going to tread carefully from this point to avoid spoilers for a twenty-year-old show. That’s how much I care.)
Just as Laura can be seen as an excuse, so can some of the show’s supernatural elements. It never sat right with me how Laura’s killer was, in essence, forgiven for all crimes by Peaks’ possession plotline. Fire Walk With Me, however, strips those excuses away again.
After the Black Lodge and the backwards talking and the David Bowie cameo and the inexplicably chilling monkey-face that appears from behind a mask, Fire Walk With Me shows us the psychic toll of all this horror on Laura herself.
And it leaves us with a broken young woman who – despite all those TV Guide cover stories and I Killed Laura Palmer T-shirts – finally finds some kind of peace.
Resident Evil vs. General Public
Last week, I watched latest Resident Evil movie: Afterlife. And the only possible explanation for it is that director Paul W. S. Anderson just saw that cool new Matrix film everyone’s been talking about and thought it was totally, like, rad!
This movie doesn’t just borrow bullet time – it has a permanently-sunglassed character doing a bad impression of Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith. It also steals liberally from Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, and Del Toro’s Blade 2, and maybe even a little Akira for good measure.
It’s like Anderson is making fan-fiction versions of his favourite scenes from others’ films. But unlike the “movie as bingo card” self-aware bravura of Tarantino, the Resident Evil series seems to take itself absolutely, stone-faced seriously…
…and that’s why I so enjoyed the company of the two strangers sitting next to me.
As a critic, you get used to media screenings. There’s only ever a handful of you in the cinema, you’re barely forced to sit through previews, and it’s hard to get a real, rousing wave of crowd reaction. This screening, though, was filled with competition winners. That meant there were people attending who’d never usually find themselves watching a sort-of-zombie film. But hey, it’s free! And in 3D!
Sitting to my left were two women, mid-50s if I had to guess, chatting blithely through the film’s first ten minutes. I was getting ready to respond to this with the usual Hulk-like rage when their interactions shifted into three neat categories:
One: asking questions. Not of each other, but of the film itself. “Who is that?” “What is she doing?” I kept expecting the movie to quietly achieve sentience, Skynet-style, and respond from the front of the theatre. “I intend to answer your questions,” it would say, “using the unfolding narrative of the film itself!”
Two: making vague, obvious predictions. How vague and obvious? “Something’s going to happen!” one whispered to the other. When something did, indeed, happen, she added: “Told you.”
Three: clutching each other in absolute freaking make-it-stop terror every single time the movie offered up a sudden shock. I’m not as much of a hardcore horror-buff as some, but like most fans of the genre, I’m usually fairly unscareable. Resident Evil: Afterlife is barely a horror film; it’s more an action / sci-fi with ‘boo!’ moments throughout. Soon enough, though, every time they jumped out of their skin I found myself doing the same.
I’d forgotten that fear is contagious, just like laughter.