Finger the Moon and Quaff Mad Laudanum: GOTHIC (1986)

Readers know I look askance upon adoring fetishistic biopics, the auteur often covertly trying to align their own stars with their heroes whether its conscious or not, and in the process making, as they say, a movie about--to borrow Zen koan-- a pointing finger rather than about the moon. Ignoramuses! What do they know about great art and suffering? They love to make a gorgeous finger and presume the moon will magically appear. Well, for Ken Russell, it may be thrice as true as for others but he at least goes for broke - he's all in. He'll show you the moon, and then stick that finger in its deepest crater. Such a crater is GOTHIC, the 1987 all-out wild night in during a storm with Percy and the future Mary Shelly and her swinging mystical half-sister Claire at Lord Byron's 19th century Swiss chalet while quaffing laudanum, indulging in rock star sensuality and wordplay, conducting a seance, trying to contact Mary's dead baby, etc. and conducting a ghost story writing contest. Mary winning in the long term with Frankenstein (with Percy's help) but Byron's personal physician Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre (with Byron's help), creating the first work of vampire fiction. So you could cite this long druggy night as the birth of the gothic style of horror fiction and the first salvo towards the Universal pantheon. BUT here we're a long way from normal narrative, more like a creative lunatic ground zero, reminiscent of what an intimate group sex acid trip might be if held at a swanky mansion done up with creepy haunted house carnival ride tableaux and wild sound effects.

Russell's pre-MTV yen for adding surreal pre-music video imagery to musician, artist and film star biopics suffuses his whole 70s output: Valentino, Lisztomania, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah, Mahler, and Oscar Wilde attending a performance of his Salome's Last Dance at a high-class brothel. The results err all-too-often on the side of the bawdy and grotesque, often leading to pretentious and unwieldy dialogue, with a louche subject and an authorial taste for bizarre imagery bashing into each other without any real way to make them cohesively match. It's not to say Ken cann't deliver, especially when given an actor able to actually sound natural in his artsy waxing, like William Hurt in Altered States or Oliver Reed in The Devils. Russell needs a handsome, brooding star to keep his orgiastic infernos on some kind of firm axis.

Don't you fuckin' look at me!

For Gothic we almost get that. There's Natasha Richardson as Mary, very good in the tense agonized sweat-sheen fear states, but upstaged in the looney-tunes Anita and Marianne-style cool glimmer twin reflection department by Miriam Cyr as her nympho-mystical half-sister Claire. Shagging Lord Byron (who isn't) and pregnant with his child, she steals all her big scenes; Julian Sands comes off probably the best of them all as strung-out Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), totally haunted by a terror of death coupled to regular bouts of opiate withdrawal (though based on the plentitude of laudanum that would seem unlikely). Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron comes of just so-so. One expects a little more as far as leaning into the madness rather than seeming like merely a smooth-talking cad using the occult as an excuse for philandering. His demons seem to consist of dimly realizing the damage his bisexual orgiastic take no prisoners approach does to his long-term partners. Lastly, in ever way, there's Timothy Spall, overacting the roof off as Dr. Polidori, gamely keeping everyone high off their asses while eschewing the orgy in favor of banging his hand on the nail that holds the cross over his bed (presumably to keep himself from masturbating -- a mortal sin!)

Since this is a Russell movie, the sex and drugs are all urgently leading to something, that old devil moon again. Here they maybe accidentally summon a vampire spirit into the chalet during a seance (guided by Claire, a medium). It howls from without, laughs from within and mocks them from the next room, whichever room they're in, driving each character deeper into the strange bowels of the villa, and into their own labyrinthine minds.

The main thing is, though, in a house stocked with servants and guests all in different rooms, who would be surprised to see a shadow or hear a voice laughing in another room while they're trying to sleep? These things are where Russell shows a surprisingly tenderfoot lack of awareness (exhibited in his earlier Altered States) of the effects of the drugs he shows being taken. No one really high on laudanum is going to give a shit about someone laughing at them from another room, nor would they get the heebie jeebies about death - that's for the next night, after the laudanum runs out. It's the same sort of confused thinking that leads some writers to confuse the DTs with drinking instead of with not drinking. The DTs being the result of alcohol withdrawal (once you've become hopelessly physically addicted) rather than from overuse.

The wild unhinged supernatural whooping might have been easier borne with a better druggier sound mix (ala recent works like Climax and Spring Breakers), but as is there's the feeling none of these actors might have done drugs except maybe Julian Sands, who has a kind of kinetic sexy madness with his poesy lines. One must never forget how perfect he was in Naked Lunch! This is a guy who knows how to seem like he's being seen through a psychedelic prism. He can be full of creepy come-ons, where you find yourself being led by him into strange alleyways when part of you is screaming to run but another part is enthralled. Here he's an opium addict who needs higher and higher doses to keep the poetic madness and fear of the grave from reducing him to a howling, gibbering (but still shockingly loquacious) thing. Luckily Sands makes it very sexy and has a fine moment standing naked in the storm atop the roof shouting about electricity. Cyr, for her part, a muse not a writer (the Anita Pallenberg of the group), does a bang-up job as the one with a mind more open to the supernatural forces. She ends up the movie on all fours, covered in mud with a dead rat in her jaws. She's the only sane on in the group.

Still. no one in the grips of full bore withdrawal or laudanum intoxication can say complicated mouthfuls like "I was almost conscious when the smell of the damp earth hit me! There was an oppressive weight on my chest!" without slurring or jumbling the words. And if you compare their rantings to other 'all in a night and one house' dialogue-driven movies about a small coterie of intoxicated artists, such as Performance, one comes away with the same impression of Russell one gleans watching Altered States. If he has done psychedelics, he hasn't done enough.

Certainly they all make a good foursome, grinding against each other. But there is also Timothy Spall's sexually frustrated, closeted Dr. Milidori who keeps them all high as a kite with his ministering. Good grief. By the end of the night he's bathed in sweat, head shaved, bloody and babbling -- sigh, anything for attention. I know this type well. The same acid trip that lifts the rest of us up to a higher plane leaves them an insecure wreck, needing everyone to pay attention to their nervous breakdown performance. We can feel the crippling self conscious emanating out of them like an uncouth discharge. It really creates a damper on any 'happening.'

Russell films with a lot of fisheye lenses as character run in and out of mostly empty rooms, the kind with clean wooden floors and maybe one old piece of furniture in a corner covered with white linens, evoking any number of Kate Bush videos. Another issue is that, this being the age before electricity, this huge mansion is way too brightly lit for the circumstances. It's not flat TV lighting per se, but it's a far cry from the gorgeous use of blacks we get in other, similar candle and oil lamp-lit movies. Russell has a gift with setting up good actors in wild sets with florid dialogue, but falls apart in the pacing element. While compulsively watchable, Gothic is wildly disjointed and ridiculous. Horrors merely tumble on upon the other with no rhyme or reason. We never get a sense of where anyone is in relation to anyone else. It all ends with an unborn baby floating beneath the depths, as close in head shape to Karloff in Pearce's makeup as the lawyers will bear.

One interesting note is the way homosexuality is handled. Though there are the two ladies, both available for whatever, the terror of the (female) vampire spirit they conjured steeps the latter half in a kind of unbridled horror of the female body. Byron continually makes his female lovers wear gender neutral masks  (including his housemaid) or cover their faces with sheets (even Mary), and Percy's big fear is a woman's breast with eyes for nipples. Cyr's Claire is regularly deemed a kind of combination coquette and animalistic shaman: "She's locked in sleep! Trapped like a dreaming human form." Meow!

Since I've had wild night like this, and indeed first saw this film via a rental watched around 3 AM during an acid trip with my bandmates and girlfriends, I have a kind of proximal responsibility towards Gothic, as if it's a page in my late 80s memory scrapbook. It's so almost great. I wonder what wildness might have resulted in its stead if, before setting down to write the script, Russell could have taken a bunch of shrooms with some cool artsy college kids and then taken them to a double feature of Suspiria and Performance. Dude, it might have changed his whole perspective. But instead, with Gothic, it seems he's taking the long way around. Instead there's exchanges like this:

"But God is dead!" - Percy
"But haven't we raised the dead?" - Mary

It's nice that these decadents do gaily grind to each other but the problem is that these relationships never develop nor give us much of an arc: they start at a 9 and go up to 10 and stay there for the bulk of the film. Mary isn't a fan of Byron's strange hold over Percy and her sister Claire. She tells him Claire is pregnant (in real life she'd have his child) and Byron's response is a flippant "I'm sure even Polidori can perform a simple abortion" which seems so needlessly cruel and anachronistic it takes us out of the vibe. Mary grieves for her own dead child (thus the submerged baby brought back by electricity that will be you-know-who). We learn she's the least into the ghost story challenge, and, in a sly, backhanded way, the film almost robs her of sole authorship of Frankenstein, implying it is just as much the product of her lovers' frustrated homosexual drives, the repressions of the time giving birth to monsters as gay artistes force themselves into heterosexual pair bonding and bring the wife to a lot of weekends with other brooding "Byronic" artistes like themselves (and what goes on in the Alps stays in the Alps).

The good part is the intended similarity between this magic night and the correct way to take LSD, i.e. in the right set and setting, in a big safe space full of cool rooms to run through, with a bunch of cool artists who aren't going to take advantage of your dislocated mind, at least not anymore than they have already. To do it right you need plenty of space to run around facing your own demons, having wild sex with phantoms, and/or taking a shower with your clothes on. To that end, there's plenty of well staged weird little scenes, not unlike as if God or the chalet's decorator had arranged it all to evoke a haunted attraction, where each room has some bizarre sculpture that moves (there's someone inside it!) or has a boa constrictor coiling around its neck, or whatever.  

As for Halloween it's the perfect party movie, as I remember from seeing it really drunk with a bunch of people, all of whom were cool and high and able to spout poetry without it sounding much too measured, scripted and aware of its immortal importance. Yet here we are.  The moon is just as far away as ever. Maybe the gift of memory is that one is free not see how it all may have looked from the outside, from the aghast dorm room neighbor trying to study while you run shrieking down the hall raving about eternal life, dripping beer and rain water, e feeling yourself as a blessed holy madman, dripping sunshine and brilliant wordplay down upon a grateful continent. 

---SPECIAL NOTE:
-- Sorry if this is rambling - my cat Olive died in the middle of the night last night. I'm still in shock. There's a huge Prime list of films for Halloween coming my next post, but I had to give you a taste. If you're still there. The stream of consciousness writing eases my tortured brain. She was the best cat in the world, and watching her die in my girlfriend's arms after her death moans woke us at 3 AM will haunt me the rest of my days, so much like nightmares and dreaded thoughts I'd had lying there with her between us, basking in her magic unifying love. But I think of her goodness. The good times. And let her spirit depart for whatever cool cushion may wait for her in the next realm. Death is a fuckin' nightmare to watch happen. I'd never seen a being I dearly love gasping in a seizure of fear and pain then going totally dead before you even fully wake up, panicked but irrational, unable to even read the phone in a frantic scroll for help, glasses off, seeing double on the screen and then --a living cat changes to dead tissue with a silent gasp, before we could even... 

Powerless, dreaming of a way to just shock her back to life via the thunderbolt of a compassionate Zeus or Franklin, like Shelley with her dead child in the sea. Remember the good times. That dewey look she gave. We love you Olive. xoxoxo Thank you so much for being with us.

24-hours of Netflix Streaming Horror--A Curated List of 16 Weird, Spooky Wonders

The all-night horror marathon --a long-standing tradition wherever Halloween traditions are solidly entombed in the crypt of cinematic history. The idea behind it is simple: the longer you stay up, the more films you watch, the deeper into late night / early morning you go, the creepier it gets as more people fall asleep and the night gradually becomes yours and yours alone and consensual reality fades and you move inside the screen, and your date follows a creepy bunny out of the theater down the sleep arson rabbit hole, no wait, that's you, a half-dreamer / half-watcher and the movie and your unconscious merge and characters in the film look right at you, talk to you, freak you out. You turn around and when you look again you just see an empty couch onscreen, and you're holding a candelabra and walking down a dark hall. And there's no one awake to hear you scream, because you put the volume down low to not wake them.

At college they had one of these festivals every year and after the first few hours they stopped taking tickets at the door and half the crowd went home, weary and irritable. By dawn it was only the hardcore, and the people working the projector. Then I'd sneak in, armed with flask and dilated pupils. There was nothing quite as satisfying as creeping across a deserted campus at the first crack of dawn, coming into the darkened theater to find THE TINGLER had just begun... If you have Netflix though, you can skip having to out your boots on to slog across campus. All you have to do is clear your que and line them up: each film is hand-selected for each particular time of evening, night and morning and afternoon, and to follow one another organically, like a good mix tape. Because if you have a sizable DVD collection as I do, then you know it can become paralyzing to choose the next film, fumbling through your bookshelves, scrolling endlessly through your instant libraries.

It's also annoying when you stumble on a cool list of weird movies online, read about one you never heard of and want to see, but can't find it. So you put it in your Netflix que and by the time it comes you forgot why you wanted to see it! Well, with this list you can forget about the options, the Acidemic Horror festival has you covered (Presuming all or any of these films are still up on streaming by the time you get this) 

And special Note: there's NO torture porn or sexual assault or slapstick, or animal abuse,  just the spine-tingling spookiness (and occasional lesbian cannibalism) that carries the tingling electric current along the soul's angsty wires. So dig, trust, and stay up so late you're up early --and with a little clean-up (exchange the empty whiskey bottles for cereal bowls) no one will be the wiser. Heh.

5:00 PM - ABSENTIA
(2010) Dir. Mike Flanagan

Start with this one, right as the sun is going down-- and don't worry about it's deceptively slow pace at first. Flanagan's film takes it's time getting started but it lures you in via the lived-in natural rapport between Katie Parker and Courtney Bell as two sisters who've moved back in together since one of whom is pregnant, and in the final stages of declaring her first husband dead (after seven long years in the titular legal limbo). The younger one (Parker), recently off drugs, is there to help with the pregnancy; she also jogs every morning and her route goes through a mysterious tunnel that recalls Billy Goats Gruff in a deceptively innocuous way.  Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, since the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. Special highlights include Bell seeing her dead husband everywhere but being conditioned by her therapist to just ignore him (which reminded me of my past delirium tremens). I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post in the other room; overhearing the great rapport between the sisters, I was soon lured me in. I was alone in the house and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously dug deep into my ancient fears, the way only BLAIR WITCH and Val Lewton have ever done before. And Parker is so good, warm, intelligent, and gutsy that you just might fall in love, in a sisterly way (more).

And the scary, ambiguous ending will make the next film hit even harder:

6:30 PM - HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
(2009) Dir. Ti West

Ingeniously retro and unspooling in practically in real time across one overcast grey late afternoon into the late evening, it's Ti West's best film so far, and maybe one day he'll make something as good (if he remembers the value of tick-tock momentum) and trusts his instincts. The cast is mixed but Jocelin Donahue as cash-strapped college student Samantha is beautiful, believable, and courageous in her doomed grab for a babysitting dollar, and Greta Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sweatshirt; their late afternoon fast food scene brought the ache of an upstate New York fall winter back to my shoulder muscles after a 20 year hiatus. I could feel myself taking a nap with Gerwig afterwards on some crappy dorm twin bed as the sun went down at five 5 PM (before getting up at 8 or so for the evening's inevitable festivities). I could feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha. The evenings upstate are so oppressive they don't need Satan lingering in the edges to be mega ominous, and while the film's not perfect (the men are kind of anachronistically miscast--one's too quiet and wussy; the other too Williamsburg hipster snotty) but cult icons Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace smash through to make up the difference in minor roles. The perfect film to watch in the early autumn evening, still recovering from the last film's chill. By the end it's too dark to go out and you'll be too rattled to break away, so just click the Netflix right on into our next selection:

8:05 PM - BLACK SABBATH 
(1963) Dir. Mario Bava

It's the only one of Bava's films, and the only trilogy, I find truly scary - the good, shivery spine tingle kind, especially the Wurdulak segment, which taps into the way family ties can become nooses you don't notice are strangling you 'til you're too oxygen-deprived to even struggle. Strongly suspecting their father (Boris Karloff) has been turned vampire, the family are too conditioned by their rigid social structure to rebel; and the mama can't resist running out in the cold to comfort her pale dead bambino, even stabbing her husband when he tries to restrain her. Did I spoil it? No man, I didn't. PS: The American version presented here is different from the Italian most fans know by heart from the DVD, in a different order, dubbed into English, missing a lesbian undercurrent, but providing instead Karloff's real voice (not in the Italian version) and "Sdenka" (Susy Anderson) is still sexy; so is Rosie (Michèle Mercier, above), gorgeously lit as she prowls the red telephone sequence. The lighting is so gorgeous it's all in a class by itself.

9:30 PM: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
 (1976) Dir. John Carpenter

It's the HD version and it sure looks good. There's no supernatural element, but just seeing the cop (the brilliantly named Austin Stoker) driving alone through the deserted eerie battle zone of East L.A as the big red sun sets and Carpenter's simple, brilliant theme make it all ominous enough to qualify. Not to mention a gang member shoots a kid through the eye for asking for sprinkles during an ice cream truck hold-up. There was some real concern in the late 70s that gang violence was going to destroy America, so groove on the scariness of the film's moment and how we never hear any of the gang members say a single word. Even here, before HALLOWEEN, Carpenter knew that once a monster talks, smiles, or even laughs, it's over. The small but perfect cast includes Laurie Zimmer as the last truly Hawksian heroine, and Darwin Joston as the cigarette-strapped Hawksian outlaw Napolean Wilson; Carpenter would revisit the concept and reverse the gender/races in in GHOSTS OF MARS, which would make a great choice on this list, too, so be lookin' out for it. 

11 PM: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 
(1968) Dir. George Romero

Two horror films in a row starring a black man? Are we dreaming? No, just lucky--and is it a coincidence both films are classics worth endless repeat viewings? In fact, I got the whole idea for this post while spending the weekend in Harrisburg, PA (a stone's throw from where NIGHT was filmed) and turning to NIGHT via their cable's 'free on demand' channel as a last resort after everyone else was asleep, and even wrongly formatted and badly digitized, and having seen it countless times, on the big screen and in better formats, it blew my mind. From the start it's been the kind of movie that can reach a viewer right through any televisual limitation, surviving in potency even through a million second generation public domain VHS dupes. Aside from a rather wearying stretch of road with a bald uptight dad going on and on about how "the cellar is the safest place" there's nary a dull moment. Even if you just saw it for the 100th time; see it again, Karras, in here... with us.

12:30 AM: LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE 
(1973) Dir. John Hough

Dark, thick atmosphere, decadent art design; red bathed Bava-esque level of warm, dusky, painterly light; the translucently pale skin of two beautifully alive in the firelight reflection of the rose red wallpaper women; the throbbing echo-industrial drone breathing, the score like one long auditory hallucination, sexy as hell and brilliant, creepy, untamed, assertive--it's ideal for the midnight hour of any festival (see more here) when you might be getting as surly as the characters here (the leader starts bickering, belittling and bullying from the get-go).

Or if, like me, you just saw it.. go for (also in HD) and full of crabby yelling...

12: 30 AM (alternate) DAY OF THE DEAD
(1984) Dir. George Romero

1985 was a year of great zombie contention, according to a hazily remembered source, between Romero and co-NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD screenwriter John A. Russo. The result was two different zombie movies coming out at the same time, back when there were NO other zombie movies, outside of Italy, of course, certainly none that would make it a first run cineplex instead of a decaying drive-in. My punk crew and I saw both in one weekend; we loved THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which really jibed with our then lifestyle (the whole thing with zombies going "Braaainnsss!" is from RETURN). But we found DAY a downer. Half the film is spent in irritable bickering between gonzo scientists (demanding more test subjects; trying to isolate what makes zombies tick) and a bunch of crazed military guys getting understandably tired of being bossed around by civilians. The pissy yelling and soldier Gary Howard Klar's evil snicker-giggling get annoying, but the idea of Bub (Sherman Howard) the first sympathetic zombie, being trained by one of the lead scientist (Richard Liberty) is tellingly Romero, who's always gone more for the social critique underlying the zombie menace and less the comedic self-awareness and suspense generation of most of his imitators. And perhaps the split from Russo hurts them both equally--the humor and speed could help with the social message stuff and vice versa-- the military and the scientists need each other after all. Meanwhile, a cool Jamaican chopper pilot (Terry Alexander) and and an amiable Irish drunk (Jarlath Conroy) have the right idea: set up some inflatable palm trees around a camper at the edge of the mine shaft and grow ganja. Humanity is saved.

2 AM - THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
(1970) Dir. Roy Ward Baker

Not only does it open on one of the worst matte painting castle exteriors in history, it also stands as a great British horror crossroad, straddling the decades with unrepentant 70s sapphic nudity right alongside all the typical 60s Hammer vampire Gothic trappings: florid dialogue, gorgeous Brit actresses, Peter Cushing, all that. Especially if you have a good HD TV, it's worth its precious 2 AM time slot because the colors are sublime. Once you see Peter Cushing's blazing red tunic in the post-credits dance scene, you're like DAMN. That ballroom looks 3-D, and then in comes Ingrid Pitt as Marcela Karnstein, and then two gorgeous fertile looking virgins just waiting to get knocked over like bloodless ten pins. You can float for days. And the time slot is just right for such 'ahem' moments, as guards are beginning to come down.

3:30 AM - THE AWAKENING 
(2007) Dir. Nick Murphy

So now it's late, and all that's left after VAMPIRE LOVERS is a yen to see and hear more British women--so effortlessly smart, confident, commanding (yet not bitchy), sexual (yet not slutty or self-hating) and relaxed compared with American actresses-- as they engage in candle lit supernatural hallway walking and weird noise investigating. Rebecca Hall--as a professional ghost-debunker lured to her existential Waterloo-- fits the bill. The movie around her aims in the direction of THE OTHERS, THE INNOCENTS, DEVIL'S BACKBONE, and THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and she aims for the stalwart company of Olivia Williams, Rhona Mitra, Kate Beckinsale, and Kierra Knightley. Bullseye on both counts. The setting and photography are evocative: a real old mansion of marble and crumbling plaster, greenish blue hues make it seem forever a cloudy dawn. Dominic West is suitably Rochester-esque as the superintendent. There's a kid with a distractingly awful haircut and a creepy dollhouse. You'll guess the twists a mile off, but that doesn't mean you don't like guessing. Just means you're good at it. So drink deep!

5:00 AM - PONTYPOOL (2008)

Dir. Bruce McDonald

It might not be as cold where you are as up in Pontypool, Canada (for the film's set in the dead of winter over one crazy-early morning local news radio time slot) but otherwise there's a lot of eerie meta sameness if you watch this film as the sun comes up outside: the special feeling when you and maybe none or two of your mates and only a few early risers and very very late-to-bedders are up and about in your time zone. You can at five AM spread you auric tentacles out and bask in the collapse of concrete consensual reality, which is like a whole alternate dimension, neither an asleep dream nor a conscious consensual reality. What really makes PONTYPOOL work so well in this mindset/time is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth in a frozen Ontario small town in the ver early early morning --still dark out, and no one else on the street, for the most part... Disgruntled talk radio host Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) begins to think the locals are all fucking with him as the calls coming in from early risers, each new call being more and more panicked, incoherent, and violent. Mazzy is a bit of a crusty handful and his producer (Lisa Houle) shows the wear and tear of humoring such a charismatic, witty but bitter and paranoid dude on a regular basis. The unfolding morning events are so organic it all unfolds in real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing any lapse. As the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. Since we never leave the basement station, we're left to imagine most of the carnage in a kind of WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast in reverse.

In other words, while not being specifically super-duper scary, and always kind of funny (even romantic), at other times nearing almost over the line into full-on literary pretension, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and affect even your seeing it. It's like you could call in to Mazzy's show and maybe he'd answer onscreen, and tell you to turn down your TV, and you'd both realize you'd probably fallen asleep. It's okay... it's okay... itsooo kayyyy (more)

6:30 AM - HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

Dir. William Castle

William Castle prided himself on being the dime store spooky matinee knockoff Hitchcock, and his palpable love of his audience, spookiness and a good time for all help his films endure, like hazy childhood memories of parking lot haunted carnival rides --cheap and loud, but innocuous, fun, and capable of delivering the perfect aftershock of spooky-nostalgia. This his masterwork, as subtle as a skeleton on a string zooming over the heads of the popcorn tossing kiddies (a process called "Emergo" pronounced "emer-joe") and six degrees of terrific. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD it has a punchy energy that endures past any amount of public domain dupe streaking. Netflix's copy is adequate (you don't really want it to look too good) and, take it from me, six in the morning is the best time to see it, ideally with a ten year-old kid who just woke up and is sitting on the floor because you've been asleep, taking up his whole couch. Dude, where are you? What happened?

Elijah Cook Jr. gets drunk and babbles the grisly exposition; Vincent Price plays deadly games with his scheming wife (Carol Ohmart); the elderly caretakers, frozen in papier mache poses of carny ride menace, roam around in the dark on wheels; pistols in little coffins are handed out as party favors; there's two severed heads, and an animated noose. (see my first ever site, Dr. Twilite's Neighborhood, which includes this as part of its 50s Canon)

 8 AM - MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

The Grand Guignol meta effect is pronounced here, as it was in PENNY DREADFUL after it, and MAD LOVE before it. A movie about people performing dastardly deeds onstage is bound to echo. Here the troupe is re-imagining Poe's classic story: Now the ape is the hero and Herbert Lom gets acid thrown on his face (again?) but the audience of semi-bemused royals presume it's part of the show. If the ape looks familiar, it's because it smashed bones for Kubrick in 1968, spooked Joan Crawford as TROG in 1970, and now here it is, much the worse for moths and wear but still the only sympathetic face in the film (Did England have only one gorilla suit? Was it because Hop Toad burned the other one in 1964?).

Either way, it's a great mask, and it's director Gordon Hessler's finest hour, which doesn't say a lot. Unless you like fake mutton chops, ratty period costumes, a script that's just a few dull eps of THE AVENGERS taped together (without the actual Avengers - just the bad guys and their victims) juiced up with lurid tortures, and boozy British actors pretending they remember their lines and marks. Well, the Demoiselles are stunning and dressed in dusky reds and black lace chokers which radiate lovely haunting power in this HD print (making their acid scarring all the more painful); and even at low wattage, sleepy star Jason Robards is better than most; and the period mise en scene is at least at Hammer level toasty; and the budget relatively big (were they poaching other films' sets?) and there's galore post-modern leakage, which is why it's after PONTYPOOL. And if you fall asleep, well dream your way right in.... into the cage, that is, with Erich, the gorilla!

9:30 AM - BLACK SUNDAY (1965)

Dir. Mario Bava

I could do without the schmaltzy concert piano score or the misogynist torture of the opener, but the rest is great, and it's perfect Halloween fare. Lots of long pans and dollies across acres of ancient castle griffins and Barbara Steele standing or lying with eerie alien stillness and holes in her face. Even the 'good' Steele is spooky looking, like a reverse Rondo Hatton! This was Bava's big American calling card, and it's a perfect breakfast movie once the ugly taste of Catholic metal spikes is out of your mouth. The print used here is just so so, but it might inspire you to get the Blu-ray, to better savor the tactile, brilliant cinematography and dreamy dark fairy tale poeticism.

11:00 AM -HELLRAISER  (1987)

Dir. Clive Barker

This was just an innocent list but it's become about the actresses of Great Britain, more cigarette resonant and unabashedly sexual than most American girls depicted in films. this chick Julia (Clare Higgins) has the balls to ask for a brandy from her husband when she's sick, rather than refusing one with a dainty little 'eh' of a sneeze like a Yank bird; and it's pretty great the way she plays with a sadistic smile after her first kill, traumatized but hardly succumbing to the American tendency to play the glum martyr --though even now she says she's afraid of thunder, and worthless husband Larry is like, "I'll protect you!" not realizing she's already done and seen things that would turn him ashen. To bring his brother (her lover) back from the Cenobiteverse, for example, Julia gamely lures a string of grotty 70s-looking British business men on their three martini lunch hour up to the attic, where she bashes their heads in with a hammer so her love can slowly absorb their blood and put some meat on his bones, as it were. Her stepdaughter meanwhile (Ashley Laurence) is getting wise, and endangered by angler fish-esque demons and shit. She's cool too but with her beyond-morality pursuit of pleasure, unapologetic wit and intelligence, and her mature handling her body, Julia's exhibit A in what's lacking in so many similar American ladies, who tend to be youth-worshipping baby doll types until it's too late to dodge the Baby Jane mirror headlights (click this searing yet lovingly indulgent list that tracks them from Lolita to cougar). Think Julia gives a fuck her man's got no lips or skin? She'll shag him anyway just as he wouldn't care if she was in the thick of her period. Fookin' A. Oh yeah, the Cenobites themselves: not my bag, but I respect the analogy towards the masochism of the horror marathon viewer! If you've seen it lately, HELLRAISER 2 is pretty good too, even #3 is watchable, but it's a steep slope, human!

12:30 PM: LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1985)

Dir. Ken Russell

Keep the British lady thing going with this gem from Ken Russell, the colors on the Netflix are gorgeous. Amanda Donohoe is a tour de force, never camping or vamping but nailing, in every possible permutation that verb can be permuted, the most intoxicating upper crust broad since Stanwyck as the Lady Eve. Her snake goddess is what Auntie Mame always aspired to be but could never shake her ostentatious Americana baggahge. Familiar Scottish face Peter Capaldi is a summering archeologist who unearths a dragon skull; Hugh Grant, in his film debut, is great as the local lord-inherit who inherits too the burden of a giant white worm; the two local blonde sisters at the inn (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis) are fetching, smart, and crafty; and even the hallucination scene has a disturbing potency-- "she had a bad trip" -- notes Grant, after one of the sisters accidentally touches some of hallucinatory snake venom. No one ever says no to a drink anywhere in the film, thank god. Between this and his Chopin opposite Judy Davis in IMPROMPTU, Grant was melting hearts like only Cary Grant used to before him. There's also the hottest older woman-on-paralyzed younger boy seduction in film since Creedence Leonore Gielgud's in TROLL 2. So forgive the occasional silliness, such as the absurd fangs and charmed dancing of Paul Brooke, be charmed yourself.

2 PM - INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

(1977) Dir. Phillip Kaufman

Let's face it, you're never going to make it this far in this bizarro festival -- the 'you' who began doesn't even exist anymore. A slough of cells, a weariness, probably passing out, falling asleep, and when you wake up, the you back in the cool raro moments at the crack of dawn with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL are long gone. It's cool. I get it. Move on if you must, but make sure it's still you and there's not a shell of a being that was once or will be you under your pool table or cooling in your sauna, or in your garden, or in the crawlspace, or under your bed. And then put this on the 'stream and join the flow of ditrates and bata. And then read Poe's William Wilson. And weep...

And let's just say the HD print on Netflix looks damned good, which is important as Michael Chapman's photography is of that great 70s urban texture dilapidated period (he also did TAXI DRIVER), filled with great moments of alienation. San Francisco makes an ideal crucible for the dehumanization of 20th century society, the urban disconnect from your closest neighbors, and the cast includes: Leonard Nimoy as a pop psychologist; Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland as health inspectors on the run; Jeff Goldblum and a pre-ALIENS / post-BIRDS Veronica Cartwright as their mud bath-slangin' friends; and even Kevin McCarthy and Robert Duvall in moments of cameo stunt casting. See it with someone you love and then wonder...

4:00 PM - YOU'RE NEXT (2013)

Dir. Adam Wingard

Let's end on a cheerful, non-supernatural note... Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption in this tale of a besieged family reunion in the woods; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads, no one who they seem, ironic karma, sudden twisting violence, moody Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. (MORE)

If you've recently seen any of the above, do substitute GRABBERS, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, SCREAM, SCREAM 2, BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, RE-ANIMATOR, JOHN DIES AT THE END, EVIL DEAD 2 (though it's got some slapstick, fair warning) and/or CABIN IN THE WOODS, CANDYMAN, or WITCHING AND BITCHING, or see them all later. And for God's sake, stay alert, lock your doors, keep watching the knobs and clutching the butcher knife or fire poker, and turn on a white noise machine or Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast to block the spooky noises of trees against the window, because they're not trees....

Acid's Greatest #15: ALTERED STATES (1980)

"There's really very little literature on this type of research. There's good people in the field: Tart, Ornstein, Dykeman, but most of it is radical hip stuff, drug culture. Obviously the first thing to do is to set up some kind of sensible methodology to see if we can't study these experiences in controlled laboratory conditions." - Dr. Jessup (William Hurt)

A fairly effective medley of sci-fi suspense rigamarole and ivy league psycho-pharmacological grandiosity, ALTERED STATES works best from the perspective of an outsider to the psychedelic experience--such as young children and squares. As the former, I had a mancrush on William Hurt and thought it was a real 'wild ride'. But now that I've done the psychedelic overload thing enough times to count as one of the "experienced" in-crowd by any stretch of the definition (not to brag), ALTERED STATES seems ludicrously over-the-top and self-important (even for someone as over-the-top and self-important as me).  Hurt plays a driven research psychologist /MIT professor, studying psychedelic states in shamanic cultures as a parallel to schizophrenia in the US. He has a pretty wild time at a shroom or ayahuasca ceremony in Central America, leading to come home to Boston with a take-out pint of magic mushroom / ayahuasca soup (it's left vague what it is). He then drinks a 'heroic measure' (as Terence McKenna would say) before entering an isolation tank. What an explorer! He's setting out to find the meaning of life--to go back to man's first thought! 

Hurt's intensely charismatic and wild-eyed performance is marred by overly literal interpretations that belittle more 'radical' researchers and writers on the subject (how dare they not namecheck the great academes in the field, like McKenna and Leary?! Are they afraid of us finding out just how commonplace psychedelically-enhanced isolation tank research was in the 60s-early 70s?). The effects are fun and the gonzo weirdo director Ken Russell loves his rapid-fire religious allegory/blasphemy psychedelic montages but--as with other films that try to concretize psychedelic hallucinations--the effect runs far astray from any actual result. The focus is less on trying to do a cinematic approximation of the visuals of a strong drug trip (i.e. trails, pareidolia, paisley overlays) and more a literalizing of it, i.e. what a child (or square) might imagine being on strong psychedelics was like after reading about it and taking all the third-eye visions literally. I quoted the above rant from Hurt's Dr. Jessup to illustrate the bizarre paradox of trying to use empirical scientific methodology to document and analyze psychedelically altered sensory experiences. 

In real life, clinical psychologists like Hurt's character, study these experiences but don't consider them 'real' except to the mind perceiving them. No matter how hard your dosing, we tend to know that feeling like you're returning to a prehuman state, remembering 'the first thought' doesn't turn you into a literal ape man; ye shall not grow hair where there wasn't hair before, even if it will "put hair on your chest," so to speak. It's not literal. You don't have to run amok and kill sheep to return to human form, your 'guide' or fellow traveller just has to say your name, or point out some weird rock formation resembles a face, and you're back to 'one'.

That's the difference between just reading about these things, and being 'experienced' in them, no matter how many late night zoo break-ins you find yourself on at four in the morning with a head full of mescaline, if you're not a schizophrenic or first-timer who took way way too much without knowing it (like a CIA spook dosed his highball at a cocktail party), you know it's probably not real and will pass. You might imagine some naive sober-virgin rube hearing that tequila puts "hair on your chest" and being afraid he'll have to wax if he tries it.... but only Ken Russell would literalize it to the point of latex FX hair extensions.

The story of psycho-research maven Dr. Jessup and his isolation tank was probably much more restrained and impressionistic in Chayefsky's source novel, but Ken turned it into a horror story along the realms of Cronenberg's THE FLY remake or James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN, replete with mad scientist enthusiasm vs. caution-urging fellow scientists, dark laboratories, lightning cracks, dials going to red, and concerned wives and panicky research assistants. Unlike the usual isolation tanks wherein one kind of lays down in what looks like a roofed racing car bathtub, Dr. Jessup (William Hurt) goes into a vertical combination old fashioned diving bell and water heater, wearing special headgear and so forth, all moodily and mysteriously lit. He climbs out and proudly announces he was hallucinating "a lot of religious allegory, mostly out of Revelations." This kind of self-important raving should bring a knowing smirk to any seasoned tripper, but this young and fresh William Hurt is such a strong charismatic presence that you swoon along with Blair Brown at his every pupil dilation.

See, he's a psychologist researching schizophrenia, studying the "interior experience." He has sex thinking about "crucifixions... Jesus..." When he was a child he used to see visions. But hasn't since he was sixteen and his father died. Dad's very last word: "terrible." No wonder old Hurt's such a mess.  But what's everyone else's excuse?

With his insistence on literalizing hallucinatory transmutation on a physical level, Ken Russell is like a child or fundamentalist imagining the bible allegories as literal fact. If Ken was filming the story of Adam and Eve, he'd probably show Adam tearing out one of his own ribs and having a full grown woman morph out of the ensuing geyser of blood and latex. Similarly, our crazy Dr. Jessup, having tapped into primal animal instincts, transforms into a wiry little ape man running around with dogs, casting long nighttime shadows on his way to to the zoo, then later devolving still further, into a big half-blob, half-man! He's gone "too far" and is having crazy flashbacks! Whoa, man. Only Blair Brown's love (or a Valium, what kind of idiot clinical psychologist wouldn't have a stock at hand?) can save him now!

To the hardcore 'heads' in the house, this is what's known as 'showboating:' the panicky ego of one of your less-experienced trip contingent is getting in the way of everyone else's high, trying to make his experiences more important than yours, and holding up everyone's parade until the full measure of his self-perceived brilliance is acknowledged. You, the experienced tripper know that the inner experience is oceanic and beyond duality and ego but he or she, the rube, is still trying to bring his along, like a surfer having a tantrum because the big wave he wanted hasn't come, or already came and he wasn't ready and now he can't get it back - and no one else out in the waves with him understands or is willing to stop watching the ocean and pay attention.

Wavy Gravy (or I) could have talked Jessup back into a human surfer form in five minutes if that isolation tank lab had a chill out room. But that would imply this was all recreational. Snagging a grant and a course release to take drugs and lie around in body temperature saline solution like a lazy bum and then announce God doesn't exist doesn't make you pretentious or indolent as long as someone's monitoring your EEG, apparently. And if your synaptic disturbances manage to create interior lightning, bully for you, old Dr. Frankenstein Hyde, but PS - it's only new to you.

"This guy Jessup seems like a real lightweight"

Now, no matter how experienced we are, we've all had our 'moments.' We've all gone a little Hunter S. Thompson-style savage, and some of us may or may not have crawled into a zoo to kill a sheep or a ram once the drugs began to take hold. I'm not naming names... (Jason R). But none of us ever did it in such glossy Hollywood style, with ape make-up and sound effects. We just revel in the possibility, feel the latent fangs and claws within our aura, take the dogs for a long shirtless, leashless, shoeless midnight walk and notice our long shadows in the few passing headlights seem precambrian. We maybe howl at the moon or chase some girl around the party until we find a bottle big enough to pound ourselves into submission with.

The next day we have to get up and go to our catering jobs, or spend the day retracing our steps in search of our lost keys, shoes, (or me, twice) pants. All hearts, when dying's done, do beat again. No Big Realization stays earth-shattering; the notes you scrawled on bar napkins to explain the meaning of life seem elementary, idiotic, illegible, or naive. To the rest of the world it's no less eye-roll inducing than hearing some wild dream you had as a kid, irregardless of whether you're studying whether schizophrenia is an illness or just a channel of God and devils into your inner TV that you just can't turn off. When you're reading Carlos Castaneda for recreation, doing mushrooms on the weekends, and studying Buddhism and Jungian archetypal mythology in class, all at the same time, it seems like every little synaptic connection you make between all four areas is like landing on the moon. It isn't. You'll find out if you just keep studying and reading, instead of giving yourself a ticker tape parade over the feeling of small-step-for-man style import those connections give you. That ego, man. No sooner have you ridden one of those massive oceanic waves as its convincing you to stop surfing, so you can get that last wave your rode preserved in bronze. In fact, better make all future surfing illegal, so everyone will have to acknowledge your feat of riding is without equal.

But to me, if you want to literalize, concretize a mystic experience, you got to find the mythic undercurrent and be consistent with all of them, and then it doesn't matter which, the way Boorman did with EXCALIBUR and then didn't do with ZARDOZ. Otherwise it's just self-important schlock. William Hurt goes to the end of the universe on STP and then announces "there's nothing there" (his equivalent of his father's "terrible") and runs back to his wife like a little baby and wants us to nod and toast with the baron for an heir to the house of Frankenstein. But psychedelic visions are more vivid than reality to the one experiencing them --that's the lesson. That reality itself is an illusion, that Big Truths are as constantly in flux as a shore line at the end of an unstable coal black sea. whether you surf or don't surf, the waves are still 'rode'. Jessup can't let go of his ego enough to dissolve into the white light of the big truth, so therefore there is no 'big truth' at all, and that's the one thing that's not true, Jessup!

But if Jessup would just let himself get subsumed by his space amoeba blob self, would just surrender fully to the horror instead of running and hiding behind his woman's skirts, he might--he just might--had been able to see that beyond the terror of the space amoeba blob-level void are many other layers to cross, the void of complete ego death is just the front lobby. Once you get upstairs to Pleiadian star space-time continuum-granted conceptions that vibrate endlessly outwards and upwards to levels where being and nothingness ebb in flow in patterns of ones and zeros like a bountiful flowing nerd river and the third eye that sees it creates it as it sees--and then, too, is subsumed, and born again-- then you don't need Blair Brown anymore, and so can finally love her correctly, as a warrior and not a boy who runs home to mom as soon as he sees the Man Called Horse initiatory antlers.

Hurt's character may or may not be full of shit but Hurt the actor does the best tripped out expression in all acid cinema (above) and our hearts flutter during the sandwich-making seduction scene with him and Blair Brown. Hurt has no problem ranting in undertone stream of conscious scientific jargon and that makes him not only believable but fascinating. While his character loses points by being so contemptuous of the "drug culture" (an experienced guide could have helped him avoid all that property damage) one must admire his willingness to put his own sanity on the line, even if he can't admit it's really just for kicks, that he needs to cling to the notion some kind of physical manifestation or measurable evidence can result in order to feel his pursuits are valid. And it's cool the way Brown is set up as the pursuer, nervously asking about him at the faculty party before busting her moves. As a piece of man art, Hurt is without peer.

But then STATES saddles Hurt with an annoying doubtful Thomas played by Hill Street Blues' Charles Haid, whose always telling him, "Jessup, it's too dangerous!" Freaking out and grabbing vainly for the Oscar gold with his hamfisted hand-wringing ala Dr. McCoy on Star Trek. He makes you want to slap him and shout, Dude! Anxiety is contagious! Don't freak out your subject! Bad guide! Bad! He's an even worse guide than Bruce Dern in The Trip! There are a lot of people who wig out in isolation tanks without needing a nervous idiot fussing and yelling and bringing everybody down. This insistence on correct clinical procedure won't legitimize psychedelic drug insight to the American Medical-Industrial-Organized-Religion complex, which has been using the vague idea these drugs are dangerous to demonize anything that would get us closer to realizing our godliness -- privileging the information (Hurt doesn't, for example, offer his wife a hit of the ayahuasca he brought home from the Amazon) and then both glorifying and demonizing the actual experience, that whole "I already did it, and moved on, so now no one else can do it" wave bronzing scheme.

The amazing "Riverman" at Strange/True reports on the actual research, by John C. Lilly, that likely inspired Paddy Chayefsky's original novel

In the 1950s and 60s a series of pioneering isolation tank experiments were conducted by John C. Lilly at the National Institutes of Health. Chayefsky clearly based much of "Altered States" on Lilly's accounts of these experiments, which you can read online and in his book "Tanks for the Memories" (oh, what a title). Like the fictional Dr. Jessup, Lilly used a hallucinogen (LSD) during a "tank trip"; here's how he described it: "That's when I learned that fear can propel you in a rocketship to far out places. That first trip was a propulsion into domains and realities that I couldn't even recount when I came back. But I knew that I had expanded way beyond anything I had ever experienced before, and as I was squeezed back into the human frame, I cried." A common theme in many tank experiences seems to be this sense of leaving the body behind and entering a vast metaphysical space where inner landscapes long obscured by earthbound fog are at last made clear.

While Lilly never actually changed his physical form in a tank, he did recount the following anecdote about a colleague of his, Dr. Craig Enright: "While taking a trip with me here by the isolation tank, [he] suddenly 'became' a chimp, jumping up and down and hollering for twenty-five minutes. Watching him, I was frightened. I asked him later, 'Where the hell were you?' He said, 'I became a pre-hominid, and I was in a tree. A leopard was trying to get me. So I was trying to scare him away.'"

Notice however that Enright was just taking a trip "by" the isolation tank. What does that mean? He was just hanging out watching his friend inside the comfy tank, then got jealous, so started jumping up and down to scare a ghost leopard? Sounds like he was just trying to get attention. No reason to go yelling for your Rick Baker monkey skin!

Lastly, one of the most Sisyphean things to do when in that altered state is try to use language to describe your visions and experiences. You can use it afterwards - hell I been using language to talk about it for years but haven't 'revisited' that plane since the mid-90s. But when you are in that 'zone' - tripping balls, as the saying goes--language is just a sandbag holding you down. I've seen kids throw themselves into a panic trying to contextualize their experiences in the moment, as if language is one of those ropes between Arctic research buildings characters use in whiteout snowstorms; if they let go they may never find their way back to a building only ten feet away, i.e. wind up permanently insane, permanently 'lost' in the whiteout of madness. But the reverse is true: if you don't let go and drift with the wind--can't trust that as a fearless loving child of the Walrus King you needing only to roar into the avalanche to own all snow--then the snow will never vanish and be replaced by loving completeness and light. If you believe this to be so, what does it matter if it was true before or not? It's true now. Placebo effects are a universal, only ego can stop them.

But you're not going to get to the promised land if you're just narrating your visions from a microphone isolation tank. Language is like the mom who won't shut up on the Haunted House ride, asking you wether or not you're having fun every five seconds, and do you remember that character from the storybook, honey? Remember the storybook? Honey? Remember? With such a mom you can never lose yourself in the wonderment, so avidly doth she drop the breadcrumbs every foot forward. Let go of language, mom! Trust that it will be there when you get back. You're not missing anything.

In their egoic vanity, humans associate the gift of language with evolution. If evolution is real, they ask, how come giraffes never learned to talk? The answer is simple --talk is not an evolutionary trait, it's a virus. It's like asking why they don't get depressed, or smoke cigarettes.

Ever want to see yourself as a primate, the 'original self'? You can't get there with language, Jessup. I can help you get there, though, without it: You don't need to hike into some South American mountains and find "the first flower" (presumably mimosa hostilis). Just get some shrooms or acid and go to the mirror and stare deep and long at your dilated pupils. Don't re-focus your eyes to see the peripheral of your vision. Gradually let the bathroom melt away around you in soft focus; let the jungle in, let your slackened jaw grows fangs and hair in the peripheral blur. Again, don't re-focus, stay on the pupils, just let it go... Then you will propel into the void and 'you will see a spot, the spot will become a crack, this is the crack between the nothing, and out of this nothing will come your unborn soul," as the shaman puts it. But you don't need to turn into a monster on any earthly plane to validate it. You just have to realize that earthly plane is no more real than the visions. You just have to realize that when language's signifier-chains are transcended all the world is new and strange again, regardless of where you are. Language, that rope that keeps you from drifting into the void, is all that makes it stale. And with a single breath and staring into your own pupils all the while in the looking glass, you can dispel it. Let it go, and fall into the whiteout like it's the arms of the goddess.


And when you come back from the void, language is always there waiting, and it's sorry it got so staid and stale. It vows it will try harder. It gives you more creative freedom to examine the shapes of the letters and lose yourself in their myriad meanings, the way a child would, or a Cro-Magnon savage, freshly defrosted. He let go of the rope and drifted into the whiteout void during the last polar shift. Was it only a million years ago? Seemed like it was just a few minutes. Look, the rope is still there where you left it, the anthropologists are already devolving back to your buddies saying "how long were you out there, bro?"

"I needed to take a piss," you answer, "but my dick froze." And the word "piss" seems like the hiss of a cosmic serpent. You're home. "Terrible" is just another word for the horror, the horror, and then the horror is just another word for Blair Brown's waiting lizard arms. Just go in, ticket-buyer, and take your chance.

P.S. I ran "Der Hollentrip" through babelfish Dutch-to-English and the definition I got was "To run, sniffing." Amen, bruder!