Calling All Macabre Bakers: Netflix's Callously Canceled CURIOUS CREATIONS OF CHRISTINE MCCONNELL

 

Netflix only gave us one short season of this very curious mix of deranged muppets, how-to naking, macabre decor, and the elegant McConnell, showing us step-by-step how to make perfectly realistic tarantulas out of cookies. Fans of her Youtube (?) channel and those like mem who just tumbled onto it during a 4 AM search for some chill baking show to fall asleep to, were amazed, enthralled, confused. But not enough people came, so it got canceled after six episodes. 

It's understandable - Curious Creations of Christine McConnell doesn't fit any easy category. There is no row for what it is, neither this nor that, a macabre kids show aimed at the Addams children. It would have perfect home on local TV, at 5 AM on Friday night/Saturday mornings in the 70s,  before the golden hour between late-late show broadcasts of class horror movies and early morning cartoons. The only way I can describe it might be, if Tim Burton produced a puppet show from hell, starring a steady-handed, elegantly dressed, staggeringly talented fusion of Morticia Addams, Martha Stewart, and Bob Ross if he hung out with muppets. Christine has a mummified cat full of Waldo Lydecker-ish put-downs, a stray raccoon she rescue - wearing a pink bow (a real bane of the cat's existence) a big wolfman kind of a thing and monster in the basement who actually does eat one of the more obnoxious guests, and even a human male love interest who might be a serial killer. And he's not annoying! Clearly this isn't for kids, unless they're cool with monsters and easy-bake ovens. 

That's why it was canceled perhaps - just too brazenly itself. People might go on the baking row or horror row or wherever and look for something random and see that thumbnail image with its fancy font (at right), and it might frighten the gentle folk in search of family values fun, yet makes its ideal audience (the weird ones) dismiss it as ye another PG-rated show of the "Sabrina/Hermione sleuth and her quirky friends at a Disney-style haunted school" variety, its hackneyed score coked with Elfman whimsy, its cast bursting with hot young guys and old character actors with mysterious pasts). BUT in this one the Sabrina/Hermione bake cakes between adventures, or maybe runs a small bakery--OMG, 2 Broke Girls (-1) crossed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. In short, it practically begs you to scroll past. 

Christine is nothing like any of that, so how to advertise it escapes Netflix's PR people. The executives should have had patience enough to let its weirdness slowly accrue a cult. Rather than let it accrue it was cut off after one season. Ironically all those aforementioned teenage witch shows are about staying true to yourself, even if you don't fit the available molds.

Truth be told, it's a weird show. I almost gave up on it myself. I watched two episodes still in a WTF kind of mood. Was this too twee and faux-quirky? Maybe, but when the serial killer guy arrived, and the monster in the basement, I kind of came around.  

What's unique is the the vibe is in total rapport with the super mellow Christine, whose steady surgeon hands making this big elaborate cakes and cookies in the shapes of tarantulas, skeleton fingers, huge haunted mansion cakes, and are a sight to see. I also like her kind of sand mandala Zen approach to it all. These baked creations take hours but usually within minutes after finishing it, she just digs in and passes pieces around -- all without a second thought. For a girl who has amazing. clothes, furniture, and stuff (she has a popular Youtube how-to channel showing off her elaborate place settings and gorgeous Victorian mansion) she is remarkably free of the kind of materialist furor that can possess artists afraid to let go of their work. 

Sometimes it can be tough to read if her type are just doing the macabre thing as a way to stand out and hook a certain demographic, i.e. Elvira or Lana Del Rey, or are legit oddballs, like Dame D'arcy or Melora Cregar. The cartoon-Victorian art direction or period gowns can seem marketed by male producers to draw in lonesome horror fans, or it can seem like a legit artist with strange tastes honed it just right to her weird liking. The Curious Creations of Chritine McConnell (the whimsy of the name is also a red flag) seems the latter.

So don't let the Burton-esque decor fool you into thinking she's all goth-posturing, this McConnell's weird Martha Stewart meets Morticia Addams vibe can throw you off at first, until you realize it's not going to go to all the hack places you expect it to. There is no single predecessor, no other such animal. It's like those orange frosted cookies with jack-o-lantern faces put out by the local baker on Halloween enhanced and perfected to the point of art, to the point they are indistinguishable from real pumpkins. There is no need for Halloween to justify this - the occult is every day. Thus a weird Scarfolk air of genuine weird  hangs over the familiar elements, and it can feel dangerous, even threatening.

Too many original shows have died this way, but petitions by a slowly growing cult fan base brought 'em back. Maybe if you sign the one for Christine,, on change.org, you'll wreak a magic miracle. Me, I would love to get invited over for more baked tarantulas and severed human fingers, but I'm the demo. I watch the Great British Baking Show, to fall asleep or de-stress and I was in love with Morticia Addams as a kid, aspired to be Gomez, watched Dr. Shock (a Philadelphia TV horror movie host, ala Ghoulardi) every weekend. I hated The Muensters as as much as I loved The Addams Family. I always dreamed Wednesday and Pugsley would kill that little Eddie Muenster, and maybe Danny Partridge while they were at it, And also I grew up watching Sesame Street like every other 70s kid. In short I get the vibe of Christine McConnell. 

Hauntology for Red October: SPOTIFY PLAYLIST for Walking through the Windy Parks at Twilight

Hey man, Halloween is a week away so I wanted to share my weird mixes.  Acidemic is so much more than just weird and accidentally or intentionally artsy/psychedelic movies.

Check out these groovy and mystical analog synth-pumping hauntological and wondrous scores and sounds, perfect if you want that chill October vibe and grew up on 60s-80s TV horror films, classroom filmstrips, and the weird vibe of a post-trick-or-treating movie double feature rental. If you like them, press like so I can crack two digits! 

 

Next up - Old radio shows. These stand the test of time and are great for Halloween chills if you still have a functioning mind's eye and need something to listen to while you sit in the dark staring at your lit up jack-o-lantern or flickering fire. 

 

  And then some Demonic Soundtracks and Scores for Non-Existent 70s-80s horror films

And don't forget my Youtube List if you want to tune in deep to the late-night weird, guarnteed to get you in the crispy mood.

 

HALLOWEEN (1978) - A 10-Step Deconstruction of Carpenter's Secret Recipe

(updated from orig. 2012 version) Every time I've seen HALLOWEEN it's been in a different visual format. I was only 12 when it hit theaters and transformed my grade school cafeteria into a never-ending whisper orchestra of giddy ever-mounting dread. That tagline ("the night he came home") and that image of the butcher knife pumpkin were slowly sandpapering our coccyx down to a sense of bottom chakra vertigo. We too terrified by the credits and of course that theme song, even the font, to watch the actual movie when came on late-70s/early-80s network TV. But we kept hustling through the living room while our parent's watched it, catching just enough of a glimpse to overload our dread before retreating to the empowering solace of DC war comics. It was, of course, pan and scanned, and edited, and different material inserted to pad the time and change the meaning of the whole film. And even then, I could never stay in the same room with it for more than the space between two commercial breaks. 

It wasn't until college that I saw the whole thing through to the end, the original version on VHS, panned and scanned, and me immune to slasher fear through the even stronger empowerment of whiskey. Once afraid only of murderers I was growing up to be afraid only of cops. 

First, we must note Carpenter has never made a film remotely like it since. There's no other non-supernatural horror movie in his catalogue. And despite Dr. Loomis's rantings about Michael being the boogeyman, death itself, darkness" etc., in this first and best-by-far film, he is still just a maniac. There are no 'slasher film rules' yet, the virgin can't be certain she'll even be the final girl or what that even means. These future archetypes are all being created with this film. Carpenter is writing directly on the primordial subconscious. The only imitator to really pay attention to the actual style and substance of Carpenter's film is Sean S. Cunningham in the original Friday the 13th. Everyone else kept the subject 'killer stalking teenagers' but missed the trees for the forest - not examining the variations on cinematic language that made the original HALLOWEEN so scary. 

Carpenter is a stubborn iconoclast who does his own thing so never chased the cheap bucks of the slasher film he and wife/producer Deborah Hill invented. Thus, HALLOWEEN stands alone as a modern film classic that might be sidestepped by some film deconstructionist/analyst writers due to its unseemly progeny and Rob Zombie remakes. But here, at last, I'm old enough, and have gone so very long without ever being stalked by a killer that I can watch this movie and have only pleasant goosebump fear and not the queasy proto-feminist anxiety and Satanic Panic headline dread of auld. And I've noticed some ingenious aspects of Carpenter's framing and story I wish to share. Attention all future horror filmmakers! Don't just have a killer with a knife and wonder why your film sucks and Carpenter made it look so easy. Pay attention to blocking, lighting, and above all, realness and in-the-moment termite art observance.

1.  Tick-Tockality: (AKA tick-tock momentum) 

a. Cross-cut Time Melt: Carpenter subverts cross-cutting in order to slow down 'real-time,' doubling or even tripling the length of scary suspenseful moments so they seem to melt and suspense becomes almost unnaturally intense. Tick-tockality (I coined the phrase in cinema criticism before the advent of the app, so I get to keep it) means a small narrative/diegetic time drawn out via cross-cuts that don't imply simultaneous movement. In this way the climax of the film takes up like 20 minutes but it's really all occurring over 5-10 minute period of actual narrative/diegetic time. So if you're watching Michael come slowly after Laurie as she pounds on the front door trying, to wake up the kids to let her in, the scene seems to go on forever. How can anyone walk that slowly? When we cut between them, we pick up where we left off. If Michael was walking past the neighbor's mailbox right before we cut to Laurie pounding on the door, screaming for Bobby to let her in, when we cut back to Michael he's still right next to the mailbox. The other 'side' freezes when not seen. It's an effect we're not used to as viewers, except in our nightmares wherein scary moments seem to stretch out and melt time. It's very effective, and rarely used. Mostly cross-cuts are used to avoid jump-cuts, allowing for easy trimming of undesirable moments in a shot. 

b. Concentrated Time Frame - single night: magic hour-to-darkness. There's a palpable fear of the oncoming night suffusing the first 1/3 of Halloween, from walking to school to driving towards babysitting jobs, smoking weed in the car and talking about Mitch Cramer. There's a long scene of Laurie and Annie driving, shot from the backseat, as if we're one of the babysitters or children, watching the sun go down through the front windshield. It being autumn, the darkness falls fast, so we go from late afternoon to early night in a shocking but beguiling jump cut. Any kid squriming with delight waiting for the night to fall so we could go trick-or-treating, or the drive-in movie, or fireworks, to begin, now finds that goosey delightful feeling coupled to insurmountable, roller-coaster climb dread. 

c.  In-the-moment observed (the mundane-rendered uncanny) detail - The sequels to Halloween go the wrong way, making Michael an unstoppable killer, turning all the victims into the audience, imagining progressively more destructive deaths for the killer, trying to ensure he'll never come back, the cast of victims grows obsessively large, the death scenes, black comic relief characters and other cliches abound, and their gore takes over from suspense. The bigger they get the less scary they are. The sense of the unstoppable killer begins with Michael, but never ends across the spectrum. No one keeps bleeding when their stabbed or sliced. Everyone's blood has great clotting ability., not just Michael's.  Instead of, say, drawing out the scene of say, finding yourself locked inside the back yard-separated laundry room in your underwear while trying to wash the spaghetti sauce off your pants, or being on the phone and hearing the dog die outside, thinking only of it's 'getting lucky' - the banality of the conversations rendered uncanny via the external threat, of drawing out every moment of entering a house, yelling the names of your presumed friends inside, wondering with mounting dread why all the lights are off, finally coming in a side door, walking through the rooms, finally walking slowly up the stairs, the tension ramping with every step, we rush heedlessly to sudden death. Take the sequel for example, with the focus on naughty nurses and their asshole EMT lovers in the hospital jacuzzi in the hydrotherapy room, then suddenly bam - a syringe crammed into the dude's neck. No slow drawn-out deaths, no suspense, nothing but creative deaths, i.e. what people remember from the movie rather than the slow functioning engine that gave the deaths palpable fright.  

The combined effect of a, b, and c, is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming and/or unseen, imbuing even innocuous details with uncanny unease. 

Part of the success of this strategy may stem from our familiarity with historical epics, like Gone with the Wind, for example, wherein whole decades fly by between busy but static real-time tableaux of eventful key moments in both the life of the heroine and the South as a whole: In the narrative structure: coming-out parties wherein the news of war first breaks out, and Scarlett and Rhett first dance. We become familiarized to the idea that we wouldn't see something, some closely observed detail, if it wasn't foreshadowing and advancing to the story. With this 'training' of our ability to 'read' a film, slower movement within a single 'ordinary' scene --where nothing special seems to be happening (such as Rhett's daughter's riding her pony around on the track while her parents watch)-- fill us with mounting dread. 

In this way, 'tick-tock momentum' subverts our familiarity with this epic tack. Just keep showing foreshadowing details, each slow step building the suspense with a progression of possible foreshadowing so that even innocuous minor details, keys, pumpkins, beers, TV, become imbued with uncanniness and anxiety about the coming of the night. You can do this forever, dragging the night forward until we begin to relax our mood; but when we keep feeling the lurking menace, this focus on mundane detail helps us appreciate what may be our last moments. We suddenly cling to our moms and dads, aware of all the dangers they've saved us from; thanks to them, we considered ourselves immortal; thanks to Carpenter, we realize this is not so.

2. Bleeding Darkness - The edges of Carpenter's wide screen are always either black or tending towards darkness or some offscreen vanishing point, bleeding through and erasing the difference between the screen and the dark of the theater, or the room where you're watching the film (which for Halloween should definitely be in the dark). The darkness of the screen makes for many places to hide, and the innocent kids seem always about to be swallowed up. The early scene of the nurse and Dr. Loomis and the nurse driving to the asylum is so dark it seems like any minute they'll crash into a wall or be swallowed up by the black. Eventually you can begin to think the screen extends all around you, and the immersion into a state of delirious paranoia springs to life; on the old fashioned pan and scan TV the slasher was effectively boxed in, trapped. But on the true masterly Panavision rectangle, there are no edges to stop him from flowing out like a nightmare baby with the bathwater darkness.

3. Forbidden Sound- The viewer's relation to the image onscreen when watching any movie is generally associative dream-like narrative immersion. Unless there's a distraction in the theater, or we suddenly have to go to the bathroom, chances are we're completely absorbed. This absorption is something Carpenter deliberately disrupts by leaving us way behind or far from the action. The muffled voices of the people talking far away from our POV killer perspective is very unusual in any other film: we can hear them just enough to understand what they're saying, but not be sure we're meant to. If you've ever heard Blue Note jazz records on a really good pair of headphones you know you can sometimes hear people whispering or talking very low in the studio - whispers - maybe the producers talking over lunch orders - you can't tell if you're hallucinating or not. It's the same way with Halloween. The break with golden rule sound mixing throws us off balance. Are we supposed to hear their words amongst the breathing and ambience? Maybe, probably, but the result is a feeling of privileged, eavesdrop information unusual in cinema, especially horror cinema which exploits the voyeur impulse but not the eavesdrop impulse. 

4) Vanishing Point-of-View (VPOV): 

 Carpenter gives master-worthy class on how to generate maximum dread from just a series of long shots down tree-lined suburban streets. Carpenter popularized the killer POV at least in the suburban setting, but did more than just that - he made every shot seem threatening. Note the use of big dark trees in the post-opener daytime tracking shots around the neighborhood.. At the right of the image above we see the road disappearing into the distance, to the left and middle is a big dark spot of bushes. The shadows are rich and deep (at least on my Anchor Bay DVD) on both sides, with the car and house fronts in the center like a lonely outpost flanked by Edward Hopper-style darkness. The darkness almost seems to be sucking the light parts towards it like a black hole, thus we get the feeling of movement without really moving (unless we're watching this in a car). 

5. Reverse Angle Denial: As Sheldon Hall notes in his essay "Carpenter Widescreen Style," we never see Michael see.

"(W)e are often positioned along or beside Michael but we are denied the reverse angle cut which would show us his reaction if he were not wearing his mask: the necessary pre-condition for empathy as both Hitchcock and Carpenter have noted."

"We are however given just such a reaction shot when positioned with Laurie at the several points where she becomes aware of being followed. At these moments --such as when Laurie watches as the car Michael is driving passes her and Annie (Nancy Loomis) and comes to a momentary halt, or when she looks out from her bedroom window at Michael standing below--suspense derives in part from the fixed distance between Laurie/the camera/us and Michael: she is not close enough to identify him clearly, to recognize or dispel the threat, and the camera does not close the gap. A variation of the device is Carpenter's manipulation of the distance of the camera from Laurie and her friends. It does not always stay with them as they traverse the sidewalks of Haddonfield, but will sometimes hold a fixed position as they walk into the shot's depth. In refusing to be prompted into movement, to be motivated by the action happening before it (as is customary in classical cinema), the camera's objective autonomy suggest Michael's subjectivity even in his absence, and again increases our anxiety for Laurie. (2)

. 6. Hawksian Seige Dynamics

Carpenter is a huge Hawks fan, and Hawks' films are all about the dynamics of group action, with the camera situated to represent one of the people in the group as people argue and layer their dialogue, so that no matter how grim the action we feel involved and comforted by a sense of belonging to the group. This overlapping dialogue draws us in. It comes too fast for us to think, just like real life, we can only follow the thread. We never see what they don't see. We're with them all the way. We feel connected and competent and brave in their presence. Even the "Winchester Pictures" logo in the beginning of The Thing, with the crossed rifles denotes a kind of rock solid safety - strength and solidarity in firepower, frontier-style. 

But soon enough that image burns away as "The Thing (from Another World)" begins. It's surely no accident that even when I was too scared to watch HALLOWEEN I had already seen the THE THING around 100 times, it was like a security blanket, it always 'worked' its magic, but in HALLOWEEN the film is metatextually swallowed by the darkness, as if a screen barrier suddenly slammed down between me and this beloved 1951 classic. Cutting back and forth to the kids watching, the overlapping dialogue momentum in the background, between babysitter phone calls, becomes trapped in the slower-than-time amber dream drip of Haddonfield, IL. It's a reminder of normal life's warmth, exiled,  reaching towards us through a fence. 

In Halloween that warm Hawksian feeling exists, but it's only a by-product of ignorance; the babysitters are too wrapped up in their boyfriend issues to even notice the ample warnings. Hawksian framing (middle range, waist-up) occurs but Carpenter inverts the sense of security, as in the shot below where Nancy and Laurie flank the kids watching TV inside the room. Though we would hope they'd be aware of the onrushing menace, protecting the kids and able to handle danger, the dialogue is all focused on Annie teasing Laurie about Ben Tramer, continually interrupted by ringing phones, requests from the kids, and noise from the TV; instead of overlapping dialogue ala Hawks it's overlapping cacophony. It could almost be like a Hawksian comedy--Bringing up Baby or Monkey Business- certainly in her way Nancy fashions herself a vivacious wild child like Ginger Rogers or Katherine Hepburn, except that there is a devouring 'shape' coming to eat them, a devouring giant leopard of a figure (to use the iconography of BABY -- see more on that here).

The fundamental difference between Hawk's comedies and dramas lies in a similar lack of perspective: comedies occur when the the hero thinks he's in danger (but he's not); in the dramas the hero knows he's in danger so he can pretend he's in a comedy. In Halloween the heroine thinks she's in a drama, which should mean she's actually in a comedy, however it's we who know she's in danger, not her. It's like the end of the climax at the jail in Bringing up Baby, wherein Susan brings in the killer leopard thinking she has the tame one, if that two minutes was stretched to a full hour. 

7. Emptiness: 

What makes the film terrifying is the emptiness - the lack of reliable adults. There's a single cop (Charles Cyphers), a shaky Ahab of a criminal psychologist (Donald Pleasance, in a career-defining role), a nurse in the rainy darkness of a car, the rainy darkness of the front lawn of the asylum; then just the encroaching darkness of the suburbs. Except for one or two shots in Laurie's English class, we seldom see more than one or two people in any given shot. Always the emptiness remains. Imagine being part of the team in THE THING and taking a nap in the coffee room and waking up and everyone is gone!

Note the deep ornate shadows falling all over the street as the sun sets in the shot below. You can barely make out the three figures walking down the sidewalk at right. This is hardly a conventional shot. It's something Martin Scorsese might do, and maybe Robert Altman, but Altman would keep their dialogue at a higher level. They'd be far away but sound up close. It's no wonder both Altman and Scorsese love rich sound mixes and overlapping dialogue.

8. The Eternally 'On' Television

Movies that try to depict a threatened middle class existence tend to omit one key element, probably because a) licensing issues and b) the difficulty of avoiding 'streaks' from the diegetic recording of a recording. People live and work in place where the TV just isn't. But if you look at the truly scary films of threatened middle class teenagers, you see a through line from Halloween (where they watch a double feature Forbidden Planet and the Thing, the bulk of the movie seeing to occur over the length of both those films) to Scream (watching Halloween) to The Ring (cursed video) to It Follows (watching Killers from Space and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet) and so forth. Having a TV on in the background hits really close to home. Do producers not know that? Are Hollywood filmmakers not aware of what the rest of the world does all night? Either way, this is a godsend to smart filmmakers as the presence of a TV, obliquely commenting on the action like a Greek chorus, is an element that hasn't been done to death. So use it, future horror filmmakers! 

8) The Teenage Hormonal Spike

I know of a lot of people who resent having to grow up and face the wearying demands and pressures of adulthood. All actions have consequences, and for someone as emotionally arrested as Michael the consequences add up only to bodies for disposal and use in creepy tableaux. He seems to have a point, as sexual excitement over boys so overwhelms these three friends that it shuts out all the warning signs coming their way. Watching them from the illusory security of our living rooms, we all have a tendency to try and get ourselves off the squirming hook by thinking 'ah they get what they deserve for not locking the door or closing their car door or letting the dog come in, the way narrow-minded parents will look for some reason their kids are lying when they say they've been abused by an uncle or a priest. It's a vain attempt to avoid the crushing sense of powerless anger. Annie especially is guilty of ignoring danger signs -- first by the barking dog--which in her self-absorption she thinks is growling at her even though it's clearly growling at something else. She sees it only as an inconvenience as--what else?--she's on the phone. Later she hears a potted plant crash on the porch, and the yelp of the dog being strangled; all she can presume is the dog is getting laid. She's blind to anything and everything unless it's related to sex and boys. 

Whether we remember it or not we've all been babysat and we've all had to deal with the sudden arrivals of horny boyfriends, anxious to take advantage of a temporarily parent-free space. Maybe we've also, once in high school ourselves, taken advantage the same way. As kids our budding crushes on this older but not yet adult girl are dashed by this coarse brute's arrival. Is this not also a fine metaphor for our own sense of powerlessness? We can't stop the boyfriend and we can't stop getting old and having to one day get a job. And we can't stop the night from falling. Michael terrifies us because he represents an alternative too dark to consider consciously. We can just disappear down the rabbit hole into an eternal 'Other.' 

8.b - Tele-Cocooning - Even Laurie is guilty of this, while on the phone with Annie she ignores Tommy's excited ranting after seeing the Boogeyman across the street because she's appalled after learning Annie told some Ben Tramer that Laurie liked ho, Look at the way Jamie Lee twists the phone cord and twirls her hair in overwhelming anxiety at Annie's matchmaking gambit. This fear causes her to miss the sight of the boogey man across the street and dismiss Tommy's anxiety the way her friends have dismissed hers earlier when she spied Michael peering behind bushes. Much has been written since the dawn of cell phones about this bubble of security and separation a phone call brings, leading us into traffic or down deserted muggy streets, etc. This effect is as pervasive as TV in real life but again, most slashers and horror movies fail to pick up on it. 

8c.) Focus up! - Imagine if Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) was so wrapped up in the issues with Nikki (Margaret Sheridan, above) that he ignored the danger in The Thing? If he just told everyone they were hallucinating after the ice melts and not to bother him as he and Nikki canoodled upstairs? Maybe that's maybe why Carpenter's remake is all men. It's not the women's fault, men just aren't as strong multi-taskers as Hendry anymore, at least not in the movies. Women confuse them. They can't navigate a woman and a monster at the same time. One will always get away.

9) Music

The music of Carpenter is so essential to the film's success you would think his imitators would try for something similar, hiring Carpenter to score their works, for example, or reaching out across the sea to Goblin, or Ennio Morricone. Instead, they lean back on the same-old / same-old orchestral cliches we've heard so much of we either roll our eyes or never even notice it. Even Manfredini's Friday the 13th score only has the "keee-kee-kee ya-ya" cue to differentiate it from the usual Hermann-string aping banality of a thousand other films just like it. (The real scary music in that film is the sound of rain beating down on canvas). The only American-made post-Halloween (early-80s) movies made in the US (other than those made by Italians) I can think of offhand to use eerie synths and odd time signatures are Phantasm and The Bogey Man. Let me know if I've forgotten any others. Today they are much more common, as in It Follows.

10)  Escape

I knew quickly that when left alone at home during my circa 80-81 slasher squirrelly phase how to fight the monsters. Turn the lights on, check the doors and windows, and then turn the TV on loud so you don't hear the scratching of the branches against the shingles outside. I'd always turn on something nonthreatening but playfully spooky from the desert island video collection - FORBIDDEN PLANET? THE THING? If you've read this far I'm pretty sure you know I own both on DVD, and had them on tape before them, and I know they can protect you from fear like only a competent group of quick-thinking, heavily armed officers on your side can, the guys in THE THING will even make sure you get a cup of coffee no matter how busy they are. If you're on Altair IV, maybe the captain will let you sneak out and hit Robby up for some genuine Rocket bourbon.  

Of course when both films are on the TVs in HALLOWEEN that sense of security is just a fleeting memory -- faded color, washed out images-- the kids only marginally paying attention, as right behind them, gathering in the darkness of our gaze --they're about to be devoured. And now the killer is leaking out of the screen and into the surrounding darkness of the theater or your living room. All you can do now is make sure your back is against a sturdy wall, far from any window where a hand can crash through and grab you by the throat. Stay alert, with porch light on and guard dog, knife and baseball bat by your side, and keep watching... keep watching THE THING.

It's Called Scissoring: IN FABRIC

I heard about Flux Gourmet being totally weird. Well, a new Peter Strickland film is a time for nervous celebration! 'Celebration' because anything by old Strick-9 (his cool nickname, I just decided) guaranteed a totally original, multi-genre-exploding work of art; 'nervous' because original multi-genre-exploding works of art don't always 'land' --especially when stretched to feature length. You may gaze in awe at his always-beautiful imagery, thrill at being able to recognize all the embedded references, savor the alienation of Antonioni-esque post-structuralism, and yet when you pick a time to go to the bathroom, you don't feel the need to 'pause' or hurry back to your seat You can be pretty sure you're not going to miss any detail of plot or lose the narrative unction - as there is nothing to lose. 

The cost of experimental eccentricity, alas, is stasis, the pre-Raphaelite fairie bower. We gaze in rapt awe like Hylas at the beauty of our own reflection, wondering when the nymphs will drag us under into rapt cinematic hypnosis. In Strickland's pond, they never come!

But Strickland may yet find a way around this edging. With each film he gets closer to making a real normal movie. He came closest with his last film In Fabric (2018) and so to celebrate the serving of Flux Gourmet, let me dust off this unfinished gem of a review I started after watching it a few months or years ago. 

PS- Dig my prolonged urine metaphor opener. Shout out to the Yellow River Boys! 

IN FABRIC 

(2018) Dir. Peter Strickland

Wise cine-urologists say: When a director aims the golden arc of his film in three directions at once, he better be on his toes, lest he be left with piss-sprayed shoes. 

Peter Strickland is just such a reckless streamer. His films are homages to the golden shower of 70s 'Eurosleaze,' splashing beautifully into a shiny, serpentine urinal of experimentalist meta-satire, dusky cinematography, and vivid collapsing, ever-shifting signifiers.. The signposts by which we recognize all the tics and tricks of the era's erotic 'dream/nightmare'-makers (Franco, Rollin, especially) are--in le universe Strickland--twisted around to leave us with that strange, alienated feeling where we kind of step out of the narrative, and it's as if we're waking from the dream of our own lives, the dream where time stops, the clocks melt, and the illusion that dreams and waking life are mutually exclusive evaporates in the cold heat of a blazing moon.

That's why it comes as no surprise that Strickland's In Fabric (2018), wiggles that stream of consciousness into three different streams, hoping one at least will hit the mark. We get: (a) a dark 70s-set period piece surrealist dystopian satire of England's Tony Richardson-style 'kitchen sink' (i.e. working class yabbo) character dramas; (b) a high-fashion updated or Tales of Manhattan-cum-decadent-capitalist horror satire equating fashion retail with kinky sex and black magic, and c) a work of détourned experimentalist fashion decollage, exploring the way the concept of "objectification" refuses to hold still and have its picture taken. In short, rather than leaning on Franco, Kümel, and Rollin, you can feel influences from Antonioni (modernist alienation), Bunuel (surreal deadpan satire), Argento (wild vivid colors and sudden violence you can feel in your nervous system like a cold shock), Fulci (gore as high art), Gilliam (dystopia!) and Kubrick (glacial gliding) all coalescing around a kind of Stan Brakhage / Tony Richardson collaboration for a Situationist detourned Sears catalogue from the mid-70s. Sure, technically it's about a red dress that kills its owners, sold by a Satanic department store, in an outskirt of 70s London. But that's like saying Psycho is about the difficulties of juggling a failing business with caregiving for an invalid parent.

What does it say about this film that the idea of the dress itself as a sentient, relentlessly destructive garment is perhaps the least interesting thing about it? The 'enigmatic uncanny object destroying everyday people' motif is soooo last season. We've already had Rubber (a tire), Christine (a car) or The Car (a different car), Maximum Overdrive (many cars) or Killdozer (take a guess)--or--probably the films Fabric most closely resembles as far as adhering to the 'possessed object killing a series of folk' narrative structure--Death Bed - the Bed that Eats and The Mangler (a laundry press).  As is often the case, there's no origin story to Fabric's monster dress - no flashback to a satanic dress designer whose soul moves into the dress as he's killed by an angry mob; no meteor crashing through a boutique window and infusing the dress with an unholy glow; no shamanic child laborer in Malaysia weaving curses into the fabric as an act of anti-capitalism vengeance, or anything like that, but that's ok. What matters is that Strickland never misses a chance to run the camera's scissor gaze up and down on the crushed velvet curtain of a scene.  The end spends lots of time showing us the blazing hypnosis of the devilish TV commercial, implying that if we ever die while watching TV, it's conceivable we would never even notice the program had changed. The image would just catch on fire and melt into our dispersing attention locus. 

Whether or not it's attempting to be some caustic lower berth satiric response to the gushy texture-and-privilege fabric worship of PTA's Phantom Thread (1), no one man may know. I don't think so, but Thread did come out the year before this. And it's all connected by a... But this ain't no portrait of an oh-so sensitive famous guy tortured by his own rich fame and a doting fan/wife/personal assistant with a streak of Munchausen by-proxy, this is about Dentley and Soper, a fashion oasis that really put the 'tore' in 'store.' The mannequins loom like aliens moving to a century-long circadian rhythm (we never see them move, but they do, like plants). The vampiric alien department store sales staff are all statuesque mannequin-like black-haired pale skinned women who speak in a kind of philosophical sales-pitchin' English, never addressing questions or people directly, speaking only in (masterfully-written) commerce-bent aphorisms. The store has an old time chute for the payments, where the money goes up and the change comes back along a ceiling tube (bringing another chill of 'bored child of the 70s' recognition from the check-cashing drive-through at the pre-ATM bank). And an old timey elevator runs through the middle of the place like a steampunk serpent. And if you think you know what floor it's getting off on, you're mistaken, it goes down, down, down, to where souls and skin and cloth stitch together in a 'Cronenberg meets Barker at the 70s fashion outlet'-style shock tableaux. 

There can be no doubt, In Fabric succeeds at whatever it's trying to do. It's always lovely to look at, sumptuous in a way that makes one wonder "where's all this money coming from?" because "who is the audience for something this esoteric?" The wonder is that the level of cinematography and craftsmanship is so high, as films this weird are usually low-budget shoot-from-the-hip affairs. Not so In Fabric!  The dream sequences are special highlights. Witness the lovely color and surreal composition of the below, the demon newborn beckoning! I could watch this film forever... but would I have really ever seen it?

It doesn't pay to tell you too much about what's going on, so I'll just elaborate on random moments and the general framework which is a kind of Damien Thorn parable, with an evil red dress in place of a Satanic changeling, and a vampiric sales staff instead of shady nursemaids and big dogs. 

First, a divorced black middle-aged bank teller named Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) buys a dress for her blind date (i.e. to wow the eyes of her unseen suitors), and second, a geeky ectomorph trapped in a working class yobbo hell with a fiancee wife who spends most of her time on the phone with her family. To go into all the hows and whys would do much to ruin the WTF progression of the film. For watching a guy dance at a pub in a red dress with some guys twice his size all rapey or not as they get hammered is to wonder what the hell is going on and that wonderment is the best part of Strickland.

Since this is all set in the 70s-80s (Strickland's and my childhood era, tellingly), she's going on and pre-internet date, this being when you answered personal ads in the newspaper and they leave messages on your gigantic answering machine. And you don't even get to see a picture before meeting them. As I can assure you from my internet dating during the early wild west dial-up modem days, that's not a good idea. But she gets lucky, and maybe it's the magic of the becoming red dress she's bought from aver Satanic department store. The guy turns out to be a salt-and-pepper middle aged knight in shining sweater armor. A guy any middle=aged black bank teller would be glad to grab, and he's into her! Thanks, red dress.

And man she needs a break. Her artist/slacker son treats her like a servant, passive-aggressively lobbing his ever-present girlfriend's vagina in her face via his bizarre but very cool art.  At the bank, her grinning identical twin bosses give her a carefully HR-approved talking-to after she takes five extra minutes in the bathroom, and surreal Bunuelian/Brazilian digressions ensue. They also ask to hear and then analyze her dreams--which are then depicted and presented as key portents towards maximum work efficiency (these dream elements will recur and are are like a welcome tide that keeps drifting the film outside its kitchen sink harbor). 

But the dress may be just setting her up for a fall, for demons like to prop you up higher before knocking you down, like an angry kid building a tower out of blocks. During a walk through the park a pit bull attacks her sleeve and she gets blood all over the dress! The washing machine in the basement goes rogue when she throws it in, and tears itself out of the wall leaving a deep gash in her hand. Even in remote cornfields, mannequins seem to watch her every move. What does it mean and why her? Is it because she tries to take the dress back? 

Not only will the store not give a refund, they refuse to even take it back. The staff do not look kindly on this attempt at abandonment of decisive and initially admirable lifestyle upgrades. The saleswoman Ms. Luckmoore (Fatima Mohammed) did warn Sheila that the girl who modeled in the catalogue died in a "zebra crossing," on a catalogue shoot in Africa, but then she assures Sheila that the dress was washed "throughly" before putting it back on the rack. There's only one like it, one size fits all, and it has the habit of trying to strangle you or floating above your son's lover while she's having an orgasm and freaking everybody out.

So it finally finds it's way to a thrift store where it's grabbed almost sight unseen by a passing lorry driver who make washing machine repairman Reg Speaks (Tony Bill) wear it for his bachelor party, which consists mainly of getting roiling drunk and dancing and drinking to the point of puking with his fiancee's macho-charged brother and their yobbo co-workers. Their crazed boozy mania, howling in the streets and circling Red in the dress like a Ned Beatty in dem woods. At home his fiancee/wife, Babs (Haley Squires).  His boss is so tough that he expresses his hurt at not getting invited by a long angry stare. Meanwhile a bored housewife tries to seduce him when he comes over to fix her 'ahem' machine, and he diffuses the situation by giving a monotone recitation of all that might go wrong with a washing machine and how each issue would be repaired. Apparently this is like a hypnotic turn-on, even thrilling those banker twins, to whom Reg applies for a loan to open his own repair shop after he's fired for not writing up an invoice when repairing his own washing machine. The boss doesn't say a word, just eats Reg's time card while the crazy synths of Cavern of Anti-Matter's strange clangy score drones to a head. 

It's only when Babs drops by Dentley & Soper's for an exchange of the red dress (which she just throws on a rack after they refuse to accept it, oh Sheila why didn't you think of that?) that someone is able to fire back enough retail savvy to make an impression on the vampiric staff, out-aphorism-ing them at their own game and rattling their implacability. Too bad the dress has evil plans for her whether she effectively got 'rid' of it or not, which includes burning the store down during a riot over a place in line while she ends up hiding out in a changing room. Is the whole message of the film that one small altercation over who was before who in line can lead to looting and rioting to the point film itself may spring its thread in the sewing machine projector and wind up unspooling down around your projectionist/seamstresses' feet like an amok and endless serpent? 

P'raps. 

So what 'ave we then? Gorgeously photographed and stylized imagery that plays on childhood memories boys have of first arousals poring over Sears (or in this case, Harrod's?) catalogues; deep tissue social satire that sometimes tips over into the obvious (oopsy!); genuinely dark and unrelenting comedic horror about the imperfections and oily parts of the human body vs. the bald wild-eyed perfection of the department store mannequin? All this and body horror galore can be found IN the endlessly perverse and fascinating-- if a trifle obvious around the gills--FABRIC, a movie so weird the producers or whomever had to rename it, adding "Dressed to Kill" at the end in re-release (just so folks know it counts as a horror film as well as a Bunuel-ish surrealist satire). 

There can be no doubt, it succeeds at one or two of its chosen artsy arcs, but when there's no 'normal' to rush back to, no 'home base' from which to get our bearings (as we could, for example, in the knotty-legged sanity of Sellers' Group Captain Mandrake in Dr. Strangelove, or Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup), we can't find a 'whole cloth' from which to start all the ripping. We can only judge it as a collection of surrealist remnants, half-off at Harrod's, one-day-only; they don't add up to a cumulative effect, but taken as weird vignettes they look like a million bucks.

At this level, In Fabric is a sporadic triumph, a genuine 'going out of existence sale' wherein if one row of cast-off ideas and satiric notions doesn't grab you, keep shopping as every corner's bound to hold an object you just have to try on to lift your dull little life into some kind of dystopian delight. 

So what if the clothes don't fit? They're literally unlike anything you've seen before, with so many startlingly dark moments of satire that any random 20 minute chunk is the wildest feature I've seen all year. As a whole though - one wonders what Strickland wants out of us, other than to maybe 'wake up' to our programming? Are the Duntley & Soper commercials that are always on TV-- all strange color bleeds and cryptic 'come here' gestures from the frozen smile sales staff - meant to evoke hypnotic triggers for consumer society mind control? Are we being dared to find all this trenchant, or is Strickland taking the piss? 

It's one thing to insult us, but when you insult our first world consumer entitlement you better be armed with a sense of forgiving catharsis or warmth by the end. Otherwise, your movie smacks of sophomore film student self-righteous preachiness, like a trust-fund Marxist lecturing his dad on socialism over winter break. Don't expect applause if you depict your audience as clapping seals, especially if you don't throw them any fish. The fish may be plentiful, but they're too far away, and the lashing talons of social satiric harpies wait for any outstretched hand. Oh how you mock blind King Phineas with the sound of your dazzling stitchwork feasts! 

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ORIGIN STORIES - or "Why Erich breaks out in an uncontrollable rage if a girl drags him into a fabric store"

I think I can explain the origins for In Fabric, as well as the whole homosexual or metrosexual or bisexual male's yen for fabric texture and fashion on film vs. the straight male's terror and loathing of it. Strickland cleary. has the same formative year memories as I do of being a child dragged around to fabric stores and fashion outlets in the 70s by mom (according to Wiki, it was mainly the now-closed Jackson's in Wiltshire) bored for what seemed like torturous hours in women's fashion stores, getting reprimanded by the sales staff for crawling up the mannequin's skirts or hiding under the racks. As a (straight) boy, my sole source of pleasure at these stores came from ogling under the mannequin skirts and staring qua-lustfully at the provocative pictures on the nylon labels. That only lasted a few minutes though, then you're back to being bored beyond endurance. If you're a boy dragged to such places, it's impossible to be neutral about them as adults. 

Kids today got cell phones so are never bored on that excruciating level. But we of Gen-X. We knew boredom. Stuck for hours in these stores we either snapped from the strain, resulting in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome / personality split leading to a career in fashion--or developed a vivid imagination to lose themselves in fantasy; and when they grow up they have a rich escapist streak plastering over a lifelong fear of being bored. That's me. I still get insanely claustrophobic if I'm in a fabric store or ladies' fashion outlet for more than fifteen seconds. Just be a girl I'm shopping with and tell me what you want to try something on, I'll either leave instantly or start a huge in-store fight. It's automatic. I can't control it. Mother!! Mother, why!?

I ended up saving my sanity by getting mom to buy me those three-in-a-bag $1.29 Gold Key horror comic book packs--I can still see the covers in my mind's eye now, especially Boris Karloff -Tales of Mystery--which the now-closed Wannamaker's had hanging on a child's eye rack by the cashier, as if sensing the need for my escape. Thank you whoever thought of that!  Today, I can't walk past a display for ladies pantyhose without imagining Karloff's dapper mustache (above left). Gold Key you are aptly named. To paraphrase TS Eliot, thinking of you confirms a prison!

Strickland meanwhile must have developed far differently than either from those experiences, with the result is that In Fabric blurs the line between the store and the comic's contents. His film is even structured like an issue of Karloff Tales of Mystery replete with multiple stories connected by a thread (literally in this case), harnessed to consumerist critique and clear reverence for the sexual allure of glossy red fabric when beautifully filmed against dark backgrounds in 35mm. With In Fabric, Strickland escapes to the 70s fabric store for his horror fix. I want to shout at him as the Gold Key lights the path through the darkness, Strickland, you're going the wrong way!"

I'll never quite feel it, but I understand it. 

Stuck in the zone of the gigantic maternal Other, looming over your small stature--and being neither the focus of her loving attention (she's looking at clothes, so just stay close by and don't break anything or annoy her) nor freed from her presence (i.e. allowed to escape to your den of toys, wherein YOU are the giant), you are stuck in a Spenserian fairy bower built for someone else, destined only to watch the process of slow materialist seduction from the outside. Your young imagination is so desperately bored and alienated you either have that split personality break--i.e. fall into the enchantment of another gender's fashion scene and become determined to make mom's clothes for her (thus restoring yourself to the center of her attention, i.e. her Lacanian phallus)--OR you become withdrawn into your own interiority, shutting out the maternal altogether, losing yourself in the all-male world of dragons, dinosaurs, and advancing German tanks (i.e. the realm of the absent father, taking the hero's journey of differentiation from the mother). 

In short, dragging your son to the fashion store too many times will either make him a dress designer, filmmaker or master escapist, using his Gold Key to open the door out of the dusty sales-tag maternal sphere. Follow Boris Karloff, he does not steer amiss. 

And one final question: when you die alone in front of the TV, does it really keep playing? Or does the commercial beckoning you forward melt away, like a mannequin in the flames of a black-out riot, the dripping plastic of the sales force entwined with malfunctioning cathode rays adhering to your wiggly soul and dragging it down into the abyss of paying the full price in a world of knock-offs?