Wakers from the Dream of Now: THE VOID, BEYOND THE GATES, DARK DUNGEONS

TWIN PEAKS is happening again. Agent Cooper has returned in different places as different selves; DANGER 5 is no longer on Netflix, but THE LOVE WITCH is. Things from the past come back yet nothing from the moment leaves--the selection is so vast picking something is impossible. So we go back in time to when--if we wanted to see weird shit, sex or gore--we had to go the R-rated movie, or... rent it. Limited by what wasn't checked out, and by circumstance, now we miss that simplicity, the narrowness of options. So we make movies that evoke those golden years of limited selection. If you want to make a movie that looks and feels like it was made 20 years ago then you might be a retro-metatextual, but I won't judge you. I'd have to pick a version of me to do that, and I'll leave that to the professionals serenely rooted in space and time, you know who I mean. 

What's important is that the acclaim for STRANGER THINGS and IT FOLLOWS helped convince a batch of filmmakers to make the kind of stuff they wanted to see back in the day, their child's mind thrilling to the lurid covers at the store, ominous Carpenter synths dancing in their heads. From the recently discussed SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL to as far back as GRINDHOUSE, a kind of borderline nostalgia future-past melancholy has been washing over things to free us all from the terrible burden of the slick but washed-out HD CGI present --wherein STAR WARS films look like video games and video games look like neorealist crime dramas.

Neither feature film discussed below is specifically great (which is why I added a short at the end that is). In fact I'd love to sit them down with each other and have them compare notes. Each has what the other lacks: THE VOID lacks patience, tick-tocakality, self-confidence, and focus; BEYOND THE GATES lacks daring, action and the strength of convictions. One needs the willingness to crank it to eleven rather than constantly dialing back like a repressed schoolmarm resisting temptation; the other needs to dial it down to four and take a deep breath.

THE VOID

(2017) Dir. Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski

**

An art director and make-up artist teamed up for this co-debut that serves a nice showcase for their specific sets of skills. Solid analog/latex effects and a bizarre Lovecraftian mythos (replete with an transdimensional world of floating black pyramids) liven up an 'all in a single weird night' tale of an understaffed hospital, caught in the midst of closing, deep in the meth belt, that gets hit with a very weird outbreak of... tentacles... and cultists. Aaron Poole stars as the shaky sheriff who lets you know how rattled he is by brining a gunshot wound case into the hospital, then shooting him in the head for the crime of weirding him out. Soon, other guys arrive to hold everyone hostage, and then the hospital is surrounded by a cadre of cultists in white robes with black triangles on the hoods. All Hell breaks loose, literally, and quickly and its all a lot of badly edited, misguided overkill. There's way too much shouting and waving guns to even notice the four different Clive Barker and John Carpenter movie borrowings melting together in the hallway trying to get anyone's attention like a bunch of ill-behaved moppets at the grocery store. Elements of THE THING and ASSAULT PRECINCT 13 merge together and then run screaming IN(to) THE MOUTH OF MADNESS with the PRINCE OF DARKNESS, up to the attics of Clive Barker's HELLRAISER, then out to Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND and the Solaris-from-Hell space ship in EVENT HORIZON, there's probably others. These boys don't want you to be bored, so they bludgeon you into an irritated stupor, like the immigrant grandma who mistakes loudness for strength. 

Gillespie and Kostanski clearly have a lot to learn about what makes those films they're borrowing from 'good', like when to use dialogue and when not to, how much dialogue is too much, where to put the camera, when to cut, and how to set up an ominous mood or make effective use of a  synth drone score. They go for a Carpenter vibe but don't have the patience for Hawksian cool or the slow-building relentless dread that is Carpenter's best auteur trait. Instead there are way too many balls in the air at once. Screaming "c-c-calm down!" in a room full of over-acting, under-directed actors for minutes on end doesn't count as plot development. When the film quiets itself long enough to focus on just one or two characters at a time, sun of a gun if it doesn't almost work! But the drawbacks of the 'more-is-less' approach escape the VOID, probably the one chapter of Robert McKee they shouldn't have skipped over.  It's as if all the elaborate monster tableaux are lined up offstage like a make-up artist reel-cum-fashion show and, if they don't keep slithering out, they'll get so backed up the film will end before they can all get their moment.

That's not to say it's all that bad. As one of the nurses is played by Kathleen Munroe (above right), a gorgeous blue-cat-eyed creature in the Famke Janssen x Franka Poetente mold who stole a lot of pieces of my heart as a wild Irish lassie equestrian zombie in Romero's unjustly ignored SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (see my comparison of it with PET SEMETERY + the RNC National Convention). Here, looking all coy in her green scrubs, she reminded me of the cute nurses who gave me Ativan and Librium when I was flipping out at NY-Presbyterian Hospital this past February. Exuding actorly grace and sultry depth, Munroe might have saved THE VOID the way she saved SURVIVAL had the writers allowed her to be a cool Hawksian heroine in the vein of Laurie Zimmer in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. But that would perhaps take cigarettes and balls and low 'indoor voice' talking voices, which maybe made them nervous. Gillespie and Kostanski prefer yelling and hamming, so you know it's intense!

 And, worse, after the first chunk of film is over, and all the tableaux in place, Munroe, the one gem in all this dross, is whisked down the rabbit hole of the hospital sub-basement to wait out a few reels before becoming just another imperiled Pauline for our trusty rattled sheriff to rescue. Ugh, hia lame attempt to find her proves way less engaging than the sight of Munroe prowling the empty, quiet hall in search of drugs for a pain-wracked pregnant lady. (They also shoehorn a kind of tired 'mourning a dead child' subplot [the grief broke her marriage with the sheriff], i.e. the kind of lazy screenwriter's shorthand for 'character development' that Carpenter studiously avoids).

Another thing missing that would have helped here: a 'gateway' drug for all the craziness: meth is name-checked (and seems all around) but there's no evidence of it. The source of all this strangeness turns out to be bizarre rituals carried out in some lonesome meth lab cabin.

But where is the meth, damn it?

I don't have much experience with amphetamines, but it seems to me, from what I have experiences, meth would make a great key to Lovecraftian horror evocation. Gillespie and Kostanski might be better prepared to explore this aspect if they'd done any meth. Dudes, write what you know, bros (sniffles) - betcha Carpenter wouldn't be afraid of a little meth 'for research purposes only.' and I bet that cult leader doctor could get his hands on some wonderful drugs - why would he even need to bother with cheap ass meth? Imagine if the bad guy cult leader doctor had synthesized some new drug - a kind of meth-DMT combo that shattered the fourth dimensional wall? I would have loved to see all sorts of directions that could have gone (and it would have, no doubt, if Stuart Gordon, Carpenter, or maybe Matthew Bright were involved). It's not too late. Matthew Bright and John Carpenter, let's collaborate, call me and bring some... 

Ah.... nevermind, I'd probably land right back at NY-Presbyterian.

Another drug-relevant angle: fostering the connection between drug withdrawal and the hell dimension. The high of variation of meth opening their pineal glands the way FROM BEYOND's tuning forks do or my own Salvia Divinorum + Robitussin + light-sound machine + Mingus "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" journey to the breathing balloon machine elf time-space mandible-weaving beyh\ond-space-time fourth dimension back in '05. Or the anguish of suddenly losing all connection to that bliss as the inevitable pay-back recovery shows us that Hell is as easily accessible as Heaven and that, indeed, one may seldom experience on extreme without inevitably spending time in the other. That, my brothers, would rock. 

These caveats aside, Gillespie and Kostanski do offer some superb sequences near the climax, and it's inspiring that they demonstrate the chops to create their tentacled visions in real analog latex. But--once again--the problem is perhaps lack if real-life experience (they don't know what they don't know). The blurry frenzy of action in THE VOID has the air of fear and doubt, like an insecure painter who just throws all his paint on the canvas and runs out of the room, hoping it passes as art, or who wants to hang with the cool trippers but is afraid to take drugs so figures all he has to do is make weird noises, call everyone 'man' and do that annoying "you're going down a tunnel" hand gesture thing that troglodytes all love to do when they find out you're tripping. A seasoned experiencer would know that a huge tentacled thing erupting out of a dead man's stomach would be plenty great on its own; it doesn't have to occur with a flickering overhead lights, crazy Andy Milligan-style camera movements, cross-cuts to a screaming pregnant woman about to get a C-section (with no anesthesia), an over-acting pre-med intern refusing to help cuz it's too gross, and around ten people yelling at the top of their lungs while shooting and swinging axes. The camera seems half in the way of the action instead of chronicling it and none of these elements help establish any kind of mood, making Carpenter's genius for getting out of his own way all the more remarkable and precious.

Like Hawks, Carpenter took his time to make sure we got properly creeped out by the slow evolution of the THE THING. It was creepy because it was a legitimately fucked-up movie trying to pass as 'everything's cool' normal. At the end of, say, the intense autopsy arm-chomping scene, for example, after noticing the king crab eye stalks and legs sprouting out of the removed, crawling head of the dead man, Kurt's exclamation 'Jesus Fucking Christ" has the natural ring of something we might say while trying not to panic. It's funny and all the more terrifying for keeping it 'real' like that. Carpenter knows horror takes time, suspense must be built piece-by-piece. 

It's like when making out with someone for the first time: the slow build, just one light kiss first, then going back in for more, the teasing push and pull, ebb and flow; the in-between breaths are just as important as the actual kissing. If you just lunge at the person with tongue extended and don't give them a second to breathe, well, honey, it's called 'suffocation.' It's also called THE VOID. There's so much going on in this film, nothing ever has time to happen. Carpenter's movies seduce you into bed, VOID just runs up and starts humping your leg.

Further detriments: a good deep droning retro-analog synth score (as in STRANGER THINGS or IT FOLLOWS) would have helped immeasurably, instead, we get twangy guitar and the usual orchestral pointlessness. There's four different composers used and none can hold a candle to retro-futurist synth gods like Disasterpiece or Umberto. Those guys were probably available! You wanted to ape Carpenter but didn't want an eerie synth score? Do you watch HALLOWEEN and think, if only there was a nice John Williams or Howard Shore orchestral score instead of that annoying theme song? UGH! 

 Next time, boys, instead of just emulating John Carpenter movies, watch the movies he emulates. Watch RIO BRAVO, EL DORADO and THE 1951 version of THING. I've HAD IT! Stumpy, don't make me tell you again. Give Kathleen Munroe a cigarette and a match and punch the first pisher who squawks. 

 BEYOND THE GATES

(2016) Dir. Jackson Stewart

**1/2

BEYOND THE GATES' musical score on the other hand is the best thing about it: an effective melange of Goblin-esqe synths by retro-analog heavyweight Wojciech Golczewski. Like VOID, BEYOND is not set in the 80s so much as set within a universe clearly indebted to, haunted by, and styled after Videos The Director/s Rented as Impressionable Kid/s. Here however, it's not the Carpenter movies of youth but a video board game called NIGHTMARE. I'd never heard of video bored games before! Now I learn they had real commercials in the early 80s, and everything! Must have been a regional thing because I would have remembered. I'm the type.

And it's because I am the type that I hoped this story would resonate more than it did. A pair of semi-estranged "adult" brothers reunite at their old homestead after their video rental store owner father vanishes. They want to find out where he went, so mull through his old shit back in his office (the store is out of business but still right where they left it, still full of videos, which they exhibit no interest in). Then they find the game.... is it a clue?

The 'dead' video store is a great location for a horror film but it's not utilized nearly as effectively in Beyond the Gates as it is, say, in the Blockbuster/Shining episode of SOUTH PARK. It's barely even used at all, except as a means to put the brothers in contact with the last thing dad was watching. 

Aside from the bitchin' score, the next best thing about the film is the video board game itself, hosted by Barbara Crampton in new wave hair and eye liner, and easily stealing the show. But even that is given short shrift by the moronic brothers. Instead, most of the film occurs in dad's suburban tract home, where things get scary but nowhere near as scary as they would get a dead video store (what that tells us about ourselves is maybe something some of us aren't ready to hear).

Missed opportunities aside, at least--unlike THE VOID-- Stewart's film has a compulsive watchability, due perhaps to taking time to develop the characters, and establishing a mood wherein some dreadful thing seems always waiting around the next corner (not easy to do in a tract home).

Too bad then, that the pair of brothers at the center of the story don't make too much sense. They seem to have nothing in common, not even antagonism. They seem to share no common memories, no shared history, and --though they both supposedly worked at the video store-- and despite of all the time they must have spent in and around it -- they never mention or reference a single film, customer, event, ex girlfriend, or anything remotely video-related. Also, though one brother is coded as kind of cool, it's a bit odd that they're both such pussies that they to stop playing the game the moment it gets the least bit spooooky.  When Crampton mentions they need to find their father, the first thing they do is call their cop friend, like there's anything he can do about an old 80s board game  ("Officer, I demand you place this 80s videotape under arrest!") Would they call the cops if they found a stash of weed back in dad's office too? 

Nothing's worse than a kid who looks and acts cool who turns out to be just another narc.

Also, if any movie seemed to invite some SCREAM-style meta commentary it would be this one. None. Similarly, one is supposed to be sober, but there's ne'er a discussion of their past drinking binges, either together or separate. Now me, I've been sober 20 years (give or take, heh heh -see The Void review above) and that's all my brother and I ever talk about! It's a way to connect across our gravitational reverse polarity. Alcohol is the great unifier, even between sober people and hammered drunkards. But here there's no connection or even a shared joke here (the sort of thing that some improvisation or rehearsal might have brought forth), nor is there family resemblance and there's no real understanding why one brother--the sober anal nerd--seems to have inherited the house and store and the other (Chase Williamson, so good in JOHN DIES AT THE END) just stays a kind of stumblebum afterthought, except to add a kind of EAST OF EDEN foreground to its JUMANJI-ish basement backdrop.

You da man, Chase, you almost finished a whole beer!

My main issue with the film, however, isn't Chase, but the worminess of the square brother (Graham Skipper -intentionally unpictured), a fella so intrinsically unlikeable it makes it impossible to tell why anyone would want anything to do with him (imagining him fooling around with his girlfriend is singularly unsavory). I wanted to smack the glasses off his head and make him do whiskey shots. There are always one or two dorks like Skipper in any given AA meeting, i.e. what we call 'tourists'. They have like a single drink at a single party, get busted by their control freak parents, OR are whisked off to a rehab boarding school the minute mom finds a bag of weed in their sock drawer; OR they just like AA because there everyone has to be their friend OR becasuse their sibling is in it and they're jealous so they need to 'do' AA like they would steal a girlfriend or a soccer ball or an action figure, i.e. some sibling competitive bullshit of the sort they would have to examine in a fearless moral 5th step inventory if they expected to stay sober, but since they're not real alcoholics, they can stay sober without any self-inventory, which they mistake for 'winning'). 

It's not all bad though. In fact GATES works its way to some pretty cathartic fifth step style carnage. When the square brother finally gets around to killing and stabbing everything in sight alongside his cooler brother, it's like a cloud parts. Still, there needed to be more of a character change to believably get there -- a kind of change a slug of whiskey would have brought out, like Popeye's spinach, or the magic elixer from Wang's six demon bag in the climax of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA or like Nick Frost's two-fisted relapse in THE WORLD'S END. Now that's a reunion movie.

Instead, what does this pisher Graham do? Earlier in the film, when cleaning up the house, he finds and then pours his dad's liquor down the sink! Why, to make sure his brother or a guest or his girlfriend can't have any just because he's so righteous and smarmy??? And there's still a whole film to go! I may be back to being sober after my--ahem--6 week Suicide Squad-style work release/vacation-- but my thought was still to kill him! KILL! There's no excuse for such criminal alcohol abuse. In AA we hate hearing about people who commit that kind of drink wasting just to feel smug in judgment of their drunken fathers (it's the sort of thing those tourist siblings I was ranting about a few paragraphs ago love to share about, as if they think it will endear us to them). Instead, "Skipper," why not stash it in case dad comes back, or give it away to some needy friend, like that tweaker at the local pub (go-to dirtbag Justin Welborn), who--incidentally--is right to want to deck you and steal your horny girlfriend (Bea Grant). Urgh.

I wish these girls (from the NIGHTMARE-esque viral trailer
actually were in the movie, they'd have made it a lot better,
but the filmmakers think we'd rather see a
pale buster like Graham Skipper pour liquor down sinks.

Still, much more so than THE VOID, GATES managed to hold my and my co-viewer's attention all the way through, and is helped no end by Barbara Cramtpon as the master of" the game." She looks terrific and seems to be having a pretty good time --more so than anyone else involved. Brian Sowell's elegant low-budget video cinematography finds new roads within GATES' suburban 70s track house milieu and purple/red/blue video game weird color scheme is like an Easter Sunday afternoon SUSPIRIA)]; Golczewski's synth score keeps burbling, throbbing and buzzing; and seeing the brothers bonding by hacking and stabbing undead demon versions of their slain parents and foes is--in the end--quite heartening.

Also, Chase has a fucking beer once in awhile, thank fucking god.

---

and speaking of God....

DARK DUNGEONS

(2014) Dir. L. Gabriel Gonda

***

If you want to see something funny and fleet-footed after these msiguided retro yarns, check out DARK DUNGEONS a 40-minute straight-faced adaptation of Jack Chick's infamous Christian tract denouncing Dungeons and Dragons (as well as books like  Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings) as gateways to Satanism and witchcraft. Come along then as two cute young freshmen girls are lured to the dark side during a LARP (Live Action Role Play) session during 'club' rush week. Debbie (Alyssa Kay) turns out to be a natural spellcaster (with real magic) rising under Mistress Frost's (Tracy Hyland) dark red tutelage to a 'level-eight' sorceress; her budding bestie/possibly experimental lesbian crush, Marcie (Anastassia Higham), on the other hand, hangs herself because she's left behind at level-seven! Poor Marcie! She just couldn't keep up. After that tragedy, and being sent on a mission into the tunnels to other dimensions, Debbie finally realizes her soul is in jeopardy. Will God's love find her in time?

Shot off the cuff, DD has a great zero budget gonzo spirit, a deadpan reverence for the Chick source material, a funny, talented and mostly female cast, and a great deadpan "embrace me, Jesus!" ending. If you've even been out on a deep end-bad trip limb in your younger druggy days, and prayed the 'no atheists in a foxhole' prayer (ala AA) then you'll relate to the god stuff, and maybe even mist up. I don't know the extent to which the ending is meant satirically or not, and I don't ever want to. It's both more inspiring and funnier not knowing; and I respect that the spiritual solution is at least treated with some modicum of respect and real love. I don't think either Satan or Jesus would be offended. I'm so proud of these filmmakers, the Ron and Suzy Ormond of their time ! After a weekend enduring THE VOID and BEYOND THE GATES, I really needed DARK DUNGEONS, Otherwise, I think I would have to stop seeing new indie horror films for at least a year. Instead, I'm back on board. 

Speaking of the Ormonds, know what else can now be found on Prime? MESA OF LOST WOMEN!

See original tract here

PS: Let me also point you towards the following retro-chic gems, all of whom get my personal, higher recommendations:

IT FOLLOWS
AMER
JOHN DIES AT THE END
BOUNTY KILLER 
IRON SKY 
THE LOVE WITCH
BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL

HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X

EL MONSTRO DEL MAR

LAKE NOWHERE

Hauntology for a De-New America!

The rise of the retro-analog synth soundtrack in recent horror and science fiction films--both in and out of the mainstream--has brought us into a weird wondrous future alternate reality where perhaps, ideally, orchestral scores will cease being produced. Maybe it's a question of listener age; if you were an impressionable American or British child in 70s, growing up watching "film strips," and 16mm bus accident and environmentalist sci-fi shorts in elementary school, UFO documentaries and PBS sci-fi trips like LATHE OF HEAVEN and STAR MAIDENS at home with the parents, then the Moog-y sounds of yesterday's future is now like the mystery of death and eternity tied into some deeper-than-nostalgic tugging, like a rope you're following through the Thing whiteout Arctic storm.

The rope through the whiteout itself is just white noise --it's where it leads you that counts. You may not get there, but you 'get' there's no 'there' to get to anyway, and that's better than either here or 'there' ever could be.

That said, even in the whiteout there are so many tangled and crossed guide ropes you could get lost right quick without the right guide. Pay me five teen dolor and I'll take you to hear Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher, and Ghost Box (in addition to grandpa of the movement, Boards of Canada). Join us in savoring this moment of clarity, when we finally remember that we've forgotten the present, wherein we finally 'feel' that nostalgia and the endless proliferation of media have made the present impossible. For in the face of so much immediate, accessible (digitized / searchable) past, the 'now' dries up like a lake spread out along an endless expanse of desert flatland that grows out by a mile for every inch you traverse.

"Now," Much of our 'leisure time' is now spent either shopping for, or cueing up, the next experience of the past. The rest of the time were immersed in these past haunted worlds, now curated by ourselves; we've become our own radio station's sole programmers. It's great. All we've lost is limitation.

If you need a working definition of hauntology, Reynolds rounds up some writers to sum up the its sound. Starting with Matthew Ingram at The Wire ("memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro-stylistics") and ends up with Dickens and then W.S. Merwin ("Tell me what you see vanishing and I / Will tell you who you are") and it all makes frickin' beautiful eloquent sense.

As I've said (but forgotten), I found this world because I love BOC and I love John Carpenter and thanks to Netflix showing me The Machine and Beyond the Black Rainbow, I finally realized part of the reason why. I was like oh wow, I love these movies, but 50% of that love comes solely from their pulsing analog retro-futurist scores, both of which are on Spotify. From there, the Moog crumb trail widened deeper into the black forest of retro-futurist analog sci-fi TV and the 70s cryptozoological funk of Goblin, which in turn lead me unto Ghost Box, Scarfolk Council, and now Simon Reynolds and Ghost of my Life author Mark Fisher, who repurposed Derrida's original (Communist/spectral) meaning towards haunted music, via his childhood spent attuned to the quietly forward-thinking ur-electronica of BBC's Radiophonic Orchestra. Since England's never fully bowed their TV channels to the LCD monetizing (Graham Norton excepted), or had to appease red state Christian sponsors, the BBC of the 70s was deep and proudly into the occult, leading a whole generation of future artists to the reins of the new decade, in ways we in the US lost when videotape erased the mystery from media through the very act of preserving it and public school ceased running 16mm films in favor or streaky VHS tapes.

For me, the discovery of this eerie retrofuturistical nostalgia began with Boards of Canada's Music has the Right to Children in 1998 and then Zombi's Cosmos in 2003. Since this stuff was all on CD, the warm pulsing sound of analog was the first time doubly ghosted and like a double negative became positive. The past sounded warmer and more organic, even more futuristic, than the immediate present. 

That's hauntology in a nutshell, and I'm hooked... at least until November, when those loathsome orchestras will inevitably return right as night starts lurching its way forward, sooner and sooner, snaking  across the stand-still city like a rope of sweaty reflective mylar-enshrouded woe through the wall-to-wall white of orchestral all-access blizzarding.

Here's my #1 of two Spotify lists:
Heirs of Goblin Carpenter



And now here's some of the more noteworthy soundtracks and soundtrack-ish works.
DESICCATED SWIMMING AREA:

THE NICK (OST)
Cliff Martinez (2014)
Soderbergh's Cinemax series set in turn of the century surgery at the Knickerbocker Hospital would be a bore if the score was in the hands of an orchestral windbag like Howard Shore or John Williams, but Martinez realizes the power of hauntology at its fullest - not the actual past music (which was after all, trying to evoke its own past), but the retro-futurist music of remembering the past, or envisioning brutal operations under primitive instruments, patients still screaming through the long disused machinery, the amniotic pulse of analog which now seems so welcomingly inhuman in our overly human age that we cling to it like we would a churning life raft in a brutally tranquil sea.

LOST THEMES
John Carpenter(2015)

He's not the visionary filmmaker he once was but Lost Themes lets fans of the master know he's still got the gift of making superbly creepy synth-based music. Each track on here could well be the theme song from a classic early 80s or late 70s opus like Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape from New York, and whatever autumnal sights or sounds you see or are thoughts thinking while listening to JC's masterful mix of piano, electric guitar and analog synths are suddenly fraught with a sudden Panavision ominousness.

PROPHECY OF THE BLACK WIDOW
Umberto (2010)

Steve Moore's big band going for that Goblin-Carpenter vibe with an intensely percussive and bizarro rock 80s synthesizer twist, NNF calls it "electro-satanic Goblin worship."

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
Sinoa Caves (2014)
For when your floating down the street at dawn, chased in slow motion by your own shadow looming 60 feet tall and with burning coal eyes or are tripping your face off at an airport, part György Ligeti from THE SHINING and part Claudio Simonetti from TENEBRE.

YELLOW (OST)
Antoni Maiovvi (2013) 
Musik for remembering what it felt like as a 16 year-old driving home at night in the rain after seeing The Terminator at an empty theater in Woodbridge, NJ. As we learn in all the great writing on hauntology, that's what the uncanny frisson memory of the mediated grave robbers from outer space medias are for. Maiovvi's soundtrack is for a 'neo-giallo' short film set in Berlin. I'll probably never see it, but I do like the soundtrack.

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (OST)
Broadcast (2013)

Formerly a late-to-the-trip hop female fronted kind of Stereolab-Combustible Edison hybrid, Broadcast were nothing if not classy, cocktail retro swing-ready, and a touch derivative. Turns out they were just waiting for the 70s BBC ghost documentary childhood analog synth reverie to kick in to become the sickly and glow-in-the dark poster child for the hauntology movement via this merge with amniotic Focus Group. There's presumably some real occult documentary voiceover buried somewhere in this ominous, but always playful mix of tape loops, effect, and poppy little stabs; "the bee colony" is a classic example of their rare ability to bring in vocals without breaking the mood.

COSMOS 
Zombi (2004) 

In the beginning, as far as this futurist giallo nostalgia went, there was just this bass and drums duo with an intensely percussive and bizarro world synthesizer twist. They've gone on to deliver great neo-giallo work that would be perfect on any Argento or Fulci film from 1971-82.

FROM OUT HERE
Advisory Circle (2014)

However you got here, this is where to stay, if  you're me, perusing the Ghost Box catalog, The Belbury Poly can get too upbeat, other acts too newsreel sample crazed but Advisory Circle never waver from the straight up 70s synth analog spookiness. "The Ghost Box aesthetic has expanded beyond spooky public information films full of roll necks and bowl cuts to something involving sharper cheekbones and haircuts. Their palette seems to shift from faded film oranges and browns to black." - Wire (B. Coley 7/15) so true, Wire.

IT FOLLOWS (OST)
Disasterpiece (2014)
From the very first notes of the very first shot, you just know, things are never going to be the same old concept of old sameness again.

COLD IN JULY (OST)

Jeff Grace (2014)
".... while tipping its hat to John Carpenter [it] moves beyond mere cloning of ones influences. Jeff Grace feels like a real contender for the electronic score crown. Cold In July is undeniably a post millennial classic synth soundtrack that makes the terrific and very enjoyable music of Umberto, Zombi, Salisbury & Barrow feel like mere fanboys playing at wanting to be their heroes Moroder, Goblin, Tangerine Dream etc [...] Somehow he puts new textures into the atmospheres of these tracks and adds a new level of sophistication to synth scoring." (Space Debris - Cardrossmaniac)

UNTIL SILENCE
Roll the Dice (2014)
Third studio album from the Swedish electronic duo with a history of Swedish TV scoring and DJ circuit touring though their forte is clearly an ominous analog horror-ready cinematic boom just perfect for walking briskly through the park while being shadowed by (or walking) a big black dog. (pick track; "Blood in Blood Out" - with its ominous thudding bass note piano keys banging ominously over a morse code echo and rising under current it's as if Carpenter's Halloween score had a moody son who was growing slowly with every three chord return into a gigantic mutant/

THE MACHINE (OST)
Tom Raybould (2010)

Dig these bizarro retro phat synth paranoid scores: Rayboulds is somewhere between Vangelis for BLADE RUNNER, John Carpenter for ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and Tangerine Dream for SORCERER, and the perfect wallpaper for a crisp fall afternoon wandering through a dying landscape.

CUB (OST)

Steve Moore (2015)
"Cub is a retro-synth soundtrack that's so good it doesn't need to pretend it's anything new. This score is the sound of a man and his synthesiser creating fabulous minimal and spooky analogue sounds not unlike John Carpenter whereas Zombi were more like your full on horror prog rock group along the lines of Tangerine Dream or Goblin." (Space Debris)

Sleep Games -- Pye Corner Audio

Dead Air - Mordant Music

Room 237  (OST) - Jonathan Snypes & William Hutson

Access and Amplify - The Brain

From the Grave - Umberto

Brainstorm - Steve Moore, Majeure

Night Drive - Chromatics

Hic Stunt Leones - Alessandro Parissi

Belbury Tales - Belbury Poly

Drokk - Geoff Barrow, Ben Salisbury

Only God Forgives (OST) - Cliff Martinez

Polygon Mountain - Ubre Blanca

Ga'an - Ga'an

Solar Maximum - Majeure

Unicornography - The Focus Group

Psychical - Ensemble Economique

FURTHANCE:

And when in England visit lovely:

Scarfolk

and also lovely Clinkskell

This 2012 clinkety-clink riveter from Boing Boing pen plinketer Mark Pilkington explores muchly the fiction and authorial booky wook aspect: "Hauntologists mine the past for music's future."
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And this quintessential post from Rouge's Foam scribe Adam Harper, explores a wide range of music, film, and art: Hauntology: the Past Inside the Present. 

Hard to believe it's from 2009. Were was I all this time? Ah, what a loaded question.



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HAUNTOLOGY FOR A RED OCTOBER



JULIAN HOUSE (Design/Videos)

  A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013)

POST SCRIPT:
And then Shout Factory debuts this the same week I'm writing this post... It's cometh. Who says America's behind the screens when it comes to hauntological excavastalgia?

10 Reasons DOOMSDAY (2008)

Every blood moon or so comes a movie I seem to be in the minority of calling great. I'm happy to time and again sacrifice my free hour or two on the altar of their DVDs. And for them, the ten reasons: 10 Reasons GHOSTS OF MARS ; 10 Reasons TERMINATOR 3 and 10 Reasons THE THING (2011)

The 10 Reasons -- an idea whose time has come... And so... DOOMSDAY. En garde! 

After the critical and commercial success of his 2005 sleeper hit THE DESCENT, Neil Marshall was Brit-horror's golden boy. Given a big budget for his next project, Marshall chose to go all out and make a big John Carpenter-George Miller-Walter Hill post-quarantine plague semi-apocalypse action thriller. Critics found it muddled and derivative. I never would have found it all had not I checked IMDB to see what he'd been up to a few years ago.

I'll confess it looked terrible from the outside, like just another RESIDENT EVIL-style video game adaptation. But turns out this is a film aimed directly at ME, or my demographic, the type who grew up shaped by the same great 70s-80s films that shaped this, Marshall's gonzo masterpiece. First, let's examine three films which are perhaps DOOMSDAY's main influences:

1. John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981): JC had scored two big back-to-back hits in HALLOWEEN and THE FOG. He was now a brand name, associated with launching the slasher boom, a sub-genre he had no interest in. So he took his rep and profits and went all out with this gonzo adventure story. His own hero, the maverick iconoclast Howard Hawks, regularly did the same thing, switching genres with impunity and mixing comedy with tension and vice versa. And Carpenter found a cheap source of post-apocalyptic urban wasteland in downtown St. Louis, which had been devastated by a terrible fire and was yet to be rebuilt. He basically had the run of the place and the result are huge marvelous sets, deserted streets, a gigantic train station, etc.

2. George Miller's THE ROAD WARRIOR (1982) 

MAD MAX hadn't made a big dent here in the US, but was a four alarm fireball in the rest of the world (AIP -the American distributor- insisted on dubbing the voices to get rid of the Aussie accents), so Miller had real money for the sequel and it's all onscreen. And he found a cheap source of post-apocalyptic urban wasteland in the Australian outback. We kids didn't quite understand where the Outback was in relation to the rest of Australia... but we sure do now. The idea of needing speed to survive in the wasteland is now totally clear - that vast flat desert emptiness makes the whole continent like one big drag strip. 

3. Walter Hill's THE WARRIORS (1979): Hill found a cheap source of graffiti-covered urban wasteland in 70s NYC, which was then at its most gang-accursed days since the days of the Dead Rabbits. Crime was so rampant the city cried for a vigilante, and got Bernard Goetz, the Guardian Angels, and (onscreen), Charlie Bronson. In THE WARRIORS, taking the subway line from the far heights of Pelham Bay Park all the way back to Coney Island was (and still is) an Odysseus-style journey. We all wanted to be Ajax (James Remar) and laughed at the seriousness and narcissism of Swan (Michael Beck). It's still the quintessential New York movie, and those heady days are returning thanks to our mayor Bill "Cyrus" de Blasio.

I've already written of how my own life was changed the Halloween night in the early 80s when my mom rented us both WARRIORS and ESCAPE and had them waiting when we got back from trick-or-treating. We saw them back-to-back high on our scored candy, the sense of edgy urban danger bringing us higher and higher... and were never the same again. I would never have believed I would ever be crazy enough to want to live in NYC after those two movies, let alone for 20 years. And I've seen all three of the above enough times that this whole blog and my whole life flows with quotes from them - Look at yourself, Max, you're a mess. See what you get, Warriors? See what you get when you mess with the Orphans? You're the Duke! You're A number one. The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla... you always were smart, Harold. And, to that outfit that had such a hard time getting home, sorry about that, guess all we can do is play you a song.

What a puny plan.

Maggie... he's dead. Come on...
Losers! Losers wait!
I'm gonna shove that bat so far up your ass you'll look like a popsicle...
Keys, map of the bridge, hey! hey! Hey!
We're the Lizzies...
Just walk away... just walk away...

I think DOOMSDAY was in the end undone by one of the most derivative titles and posters that ever haunted a great trashterpiece: the biohazard tattoo and crossed sword-anarchy hybrid symbol, the face tattoos and the graphic novel-esque three color style, along with the tag "Mankind has an expiration date" tag. So banal by then.  I remember seeing this poster outside of a theater and thinking "oh brother, again with the Neo-Pagan post-apocalypse warrior chicks engaged in endless slow mo CGI blood-splattering combat" and the whole RESIDENT EVIL, UNDERWORLD, SUCKER PUNCH, KILL 'EM ALL vibe, all the 360 whip-around slow-mo camera CGI shots of CGI carnage and ammunition expenditure and zero count characterization or giving a damn. Even the Imdb.com main film description is lame. Who needs another "futuristic action thriller where a team of people work to prevent a disaster threatening the future of the human race."?

In short, it looked like yet another adaptation of a manga based on a FINAL FANTASY-style rotoscoped CGI animation TV show based on an arcade game, rather than a moody analog return to the 80s Carpenter-Hill-Miller heyday, a loving homage to a more visceral time. Instead of promoting it as kind of retro Tarantino-esque throwback/homage they banked on the idea we'd be intrigued by graphic novel illustrations of body mods and homemade weapons. Imagining yet another incoherent parade of overused CGI and SIN CITY high def black and white graphic novel cannibal combat, my demographic bravely stayed away. They all but redubbed it into 'American.'

I only hesitatingly Netflixed DOOMSAY in the end because of seeing THE DESCENT yet again a few years ago and checking up on Marshall's imdb page to see if he'd done anything new. Like that Halloween night long ago in the 80s, I knew I'd never be the same. So here they are, 10 reasons with SPOILERS... so beware.

1. Rhona Mitra as the one-eyed Major Eden Sinclair: She lost her eye as a child at the border between England and Scotland (the latter the site of an unstoppable plague) and was the last civilian to make it out, thanks to a compassionate soldier who traded his seat on the last chopper out. Sure it's familiar - but I like the idea that she basically stays with the Special Air Service (SAS) like an adopted mascot (though this isn't clarified), since she takes the place of one of their own, and now has no mom or family. Growing up to the rank of major while her home country disappears behind a robotic machine-guarded quarantine wall, she narrates as the world turns its back on Britain for being so cold to Scotland, basically turning it into a no-fly zone quarantine prison, killing anyone who tries to escape. The eye she loses near the wall melee is replaced by a detachable camera orb that can record images to tiny discs in her watch. Very cool idea. And I like that there's no 'Eden grows up' montage, just her voiceover detailing the ensuing 'gone dark' status of Scotland.

And Mitra plays the Major dead straight - neither macho nor comical nor boring nor sexualized, instead possessed of smartly British esprit de corps. Bob Hoskins is great as her de-facto father figure, who perhaps was even there during her rescue but at any rate has clearly come to regard her as a kind of daughter but not in a corny way. She's Snake Plissken as a military officer. That she winds up in charge of a mostly male insertion force is never a cause for snickering or her needing to prove herself, and there's no romance, nor sex, consensual or otherwise, in the film. No boyfriend, no spark-baiting. It's glorious.

2. Malcolm McDowell and his younger punk son Sol as the bad guys  (in two separate chapters - they're never seen together) and the levelheaded daughter ('the cure'). Dad is living in a castle and reverted to Medieval basics (including torture devices and gladiator combat), while Saul (Craig Conway - one of the monsters in THE DESCENT!) is more a mix of Cyrus from THE WARRIORS and Wes (Vernon Wells) from THE ROAD WARRIOR. It might be hard to imagine why they'd practice cannibalism when fields of cows are just a few miles away, but there you go... it's ceremonial. I like that Sol doesn't try to get rape or torture porn-ish when he has Sinclair trussed up. For these folk, it's all about the spectacle. And Conway is a little much at first, but by the end we're glad he's around. The dude gives every hiss and sneer 110% and his lean muscular body looks like he's actually doing lots of hard work and exercise -they're not gym muscles like a juicehead drinking whey, they're frickin' punching guys in the mosh pit muscles, i.e. not 'sculpted' all uneven based on what he's doing in the real fucking world. Go get 'em, Sol.

As for the father, whose crowned himself king of a new era of medieval barbarism, Malcolm gets a few good scenes but barely has time to register aside from a few CALIGULA at the coliseum-cum-field of honor-style gladiator arena moments. His steel blue eyes glowing in the shadows of the actual castle location look great though.

3. The crazy cannibal feast scene and Lee-Anne Liebenberg - which meshes punk club antics with cannibalistic orgies, ska shuffles, Satanic strippers, fire eaters, bikes, the captured soldier dinner trussed up on the front of a vehicle like the captured townsfolk strapped to the gang vehicles in THE ROAD WARRIOR. It's funny (the showmanship involved made me think of similar scenes in IDIOCRACY), electric, and gives everyone a time to shine, especially Lee-Anne Liebenberg, who makes such a good impression as Sol's 'first lady' she wound up on the poster (and the top image). Her part is small but that crazy look in her eyes, pierced tongue fluttering like she's devouring the captured soldier's terror as he watches her light up the grill below him, is a great glimpse of someone dancing in the flames of raw Pagan madness rather than the usual 'actress trying to look scary.'

4. David O'Hara (THE DEPARTED) as Canaris - his "thinning the herd" mentality and gravel-voiced iron hardness makes a great gravitas-enriched parallel to Malcolm - three separate bad guys! And his is a much better comeuppance than Snake's pulling the tape out at the end of ESCAPE to screw over the president (Donald Pleasance).

5. The ROAD WARRIOR-style car chase climax -minus one demerit for cheesy addition of a 90s Siouxie and the Banshees (?) song that I think you need to be British to deem appropriate. Imagine if George Miller put some Men Without Hats song over the climax of THE ROAD WARRIOR, Neil! Yeah, now you know how we feel. Otherwise, sublime. And the cars and trucks are so badass you can't even begin to appreciate the detail the first viewing -- as in the human skeleton hand holding the rearview side mirror above.

6. Scotland - it's like an EMPEROR JONES of Scottish history - the troupe traveling (in DAMNATION ALLEY-style assault trucks) through the fields and highways first to TRAINSPOTTING punk rock Pagan Glasgow back to BRAVEHEART-era castles and knights on horses, before returning to the modern highway, and eventually to Eden's intact and untouched aside from dust childhood home.

7. The Time Window - They only have 48 hours to complete their mission, 'otherwise there'll be no 'back' to come home to, as the plague has broken out in London. It means they can't slow down for a second, which explains the crazy heedlong wild weekend racing to catch a train vibe. It's not clear why Canaris would come on so menacing--arriving in a giant combat helicopter--when she finally delivers the cure, and she's so stand-offish, and then two seconds later he's saying "come with us" as if there's no reason she would. Well, why wouldn't she be returning with them? They sent her! Did she miss the window? Is it because the PM--the presumed good guy-- her boss (Hoskins) trusts and works for is dead? Hoskins still works there after all. Are there script revisions that don't quite cohere? Well, all the above referenced movies have similar problems, and who cares? It rocks.

8.  Ingenious 'collapse of the real' art direction and set decoration- rewards close notice (i.e the 'souvenir shop' signs in the castle - ironically now a sign of ancient history rather than vice versa), all the great body mods and other details. It didn't have to be so rich. But it is. Just take a look at Liebenberg in the top image, look closely and notice the white ink biohazard tattoo on her shoulder. Savor the rich tribal detail.

9. Another moody score by David Julyan - I wish it had pulsed with analog synths more, but I love its subliminal checks and nods towards scores by Carpenter (ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13), Tangerine Dream (SORCERER), Vangelis (BLADE RUNNER), Bart De Vorzon (THE WARRIORS), just to let you know the references are lovingly intentional. Rather than doing the helicopter score bit, Julyan deftly acknowledges his references rather than dictating audience emotions. The result is a score that's largely invisible in that it never draws too much attention to itself (except in the above-mentioned Siouxie incident)

10. The great ending The way first Sinclair 'breaks' as she finally gets back to her childhood home in Glasgow, to find a picture of her mother --it's not corny since she's been so stoic all the while.

And then the superb "have a piece of your friend!" last line with the head and the punks. Why didn't every great post-apocalyptic movie end that way? Do I stand up and cheer every time and wish for a sequel that will most likely never come?

I do.