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Apparently all they want are demented madmen running around in ski masks hacking up young virgins
I am sick. I don't even seem to have the same bug as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel—he spent Sunday through Tuesday coughing like a consumptive, I just have a viciously sore throat and more of a fever than my thermometer felt like telling me. (According to it, I've been running cold since last night. According to the doctor's office, respectable fever. I wonder what that means last night's minor fever really was.) I have actual doctor's orders to drink lots of liquids and do nothing. I'm trying.
1. My poem "After the Red Sea" has been accepted by Goblin Fruit. It has Yiddish in it. I don't know if it's speculative or not. It is one of the recent poems about which I feel most strongly and I am very glad it has a home. That is one of the things it is about.
2.rose_lemberg and shweta_narayan have something to say about editor confidentiality.
3. Even after I signed off the internet last night, I couldn't get anything done, so I lay on the couch with a loudly purring cat in my arms and watched Fright Night (1985). Comments below adapted from stream-of-consciousness sleep-starved e-mail I senthandful_ofdust around four in the morning. I didn't sleep very much at all.
There are two major problems with Fright Night and unfortunately they are impossible to avoid; they're the central couple. I would have been about eighteen zillion percent more sympathetic to the protagonist Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) if he had not been introduced pressuring his girlfriend into sex she clearly isn't ready to have. Seriously, we fade in past the title cards and pan slowly across Charley's bedroom with all its adolescent clutter, some sub-Hammer horror is playing on late-night TV and the two of them are half-watching, making out on the floor, and the first thing we see as the story starts is Charley repeatedly sneaking his hand up under Amy's shirt as she keeps prying his fingers off. Finally she pushes him off her, firmly—"Charley, I said stop it!"—and he explodes: "Jesus, give me a break, Amy! We've been going together for a year and all I hear is 'Charley, stop it!'" Doesn't matter how many vampires he sees after that, I'm fine with all of them eating him. Meanwhile, as wide-eyed trophy-next-door Amy, Amanda Bearse is stuck in a script where she could have been replaced by a blender without any perceptible difference to the plot, except that then the writers would have needed to explain why there's a scene where Chris Sarandon makes love to a blender. Her most interesting moment is her response to the vampire's seduction: between one beat and the next she goes from mesmerized to knowing, slowly folding back the collar of her dress. I suspect we are not meant to cheer her on for her obviously superior taste, but between a monster and a pushy, whiny creeper, are you telling me there's a question? Any time the film was trying to behave like an '80's teen comedy, I wanted to stake it and set it on fire myself.
(I make an exception for Stephen Geoffreys' "Evil" Ed, even when he has to share screentime with his pointless age-mates—cocky, nervy, misfit and consciously annoying, with his sleeveless Goth T-shirts and his bedroom full of holograms and models, he's an awkward, convincing teenager and the silent intensity of his reactions to the vampire's proposition makes a compelling case for his reasons to accept. You don't have to be afraid of me. I understand what it's like being different. They won't pick on you anymore, or beat you up—I'll see to that. All you have to do is take my hand. Here, Edward. Take my hand. He reaches for the slender, claw-thorned fingers as if they're the only lifeline anyone has ever offered him, tear-stained and shaking; he buries himself under the vampire's coat as though he's come home.1 I rather liked the ending the film gives him.derspatchel pointed out, and I think rightly, that Nick Frost and Simon Pegg must have seen this movie sometime.)
When it behaves like a horror film aware of its conventions, however, Fright Night is almost above reproach. I haven't seen many monsters like Chris Sarandon's Jerry Dandridge. He's not an exotic vampire, with his sweaters and his scarves and his urban American accent, nor is he camouflaged by anything other than the cynicism of the times; he's amiable, casual, very handsome and very much of his decade, and he's not human, at all. Very likely he never was. When the finale's sunlight blasts him down to the traditional bones, what hangs there burning looks like nothing so much as the skeleton of a monstrous, man-sized bat.2 And he's queer-coded, with his "live-in carpenter," his easy negotiation of the club scene, and his successful appeal to Ed's awareness of "difference," but he drinks comfortably from female prostitutes and nothing in their scenes together suggests his attraction to Amy is not genuine. He has portraits on his wall of women across the ages who look just like her; who might be the same woman. Billy says sympathetically, watching Amy leave the crumbling old Victorian fixer-upper that the two of them have occupied like Dracula at Carfax: "Looks just like her, doesn't she?" Vampirism as sexual deviance is familiar. Jerry's metaphor is more complicated.
And then there's Roddy McDowall. I imprinted on him with The Legend of Hell House (1973) and I love him here, playing fifteen years older and at least three times hammier than he was in real life. The archetype of the actor called on to become for real what they've always played at being is one of the metafictional classics,3 but it is a gift from the gods of character acting that in addition to being expectedly out of his depth when faced with a real vampire, Peter Vincent is kind of a weasel about getting there in the first place. A former horror stalwart who staked many a busty vampire on the Technicolor screen, now the fading host of the late-night nostalgia-fest Fright Night Theatre, he's just been fired, he's facing eviction, he's bitter about the way the horror genre is trending, and he takes five hundred dollars from a high school kid to hoax her boyfriend about the vampire next door. The audience knows he has to come through as a hero eventually, but it takes him much, much longer than anyone is hoping, onscreen or off—there's at least one more waspish refusal and one more panicky collapse than the standard progression. And yet he's the kind of character it's impossible not to describe as a sweetheart, impulse to pack his bags and flee notwithstanding.
So it is especially appropriate to the reluctant hero's arc that he cannot simply assume the persona of "Peter Vincent, the Great Vampire Killer," even though that function is precisely what Charley and the narrative demand of him. He repeats the name to himself like a mantra as he enters the Dandridge house, carrying with him the props he used in his movies, dressed for the part, but the reality is unsurprisingly and satisfyingly messier. There is no stern, cold command in him as he watches a staked vampire slowly die; it's a grotesque, prolonged process, Peter's face is creased with distress and disgust and pity, and more than once he almost reaches out to take the creature's hand or pull out the stake, either of which would be suicidal, but you can't have an ounce of human compassion and not want to save someone choking on their own blood.4 When he finally gets that apotropaic trick with the cross to work on Jerry, backed by the powers of faith and sheer terror, his mouth keeps pulling into an incredulous little smile, as though he can't believe it's really working. (Fright Night is not a religious movie, I feel I should point out; there's more talk of God in Terence Fisher's Dracula (1958). When Jerry dismisses Peter and his fancy crucifix with the withering "You have to have faith for that to work on me," he never specifies faith in what. Quite possibly it's just faith in the truth of vampirism, that any of this mishegos of folkways works the way it's supposed to: crosses, mirrors, invitations, bats. At a doubtful moment, Peter reassures himself and Charley not so much with genre savvy, but wishful thinking: "Well, so far everything's been like it was in the movies. We'll just have to keep hoping!") He's always scared and he frequently crumbles and he's not, by McDowall's own admission, even a very good actor. I love the clips we see of his old movies, which are pretty much exactly the sort of thing Peter Cushing would have starred in if his career had gone straight into the toilet after Brides of Dracula (1960). His levels of sincerity can be gauged by the affectation of his accent. He looks much better in his tweedy jackets and cardigans than he does in full Victorian vampire-hunting drag. He's immensely endearing. And I like that we never learn his name. "Peter Vincent" is the character, but he doesn't tell us what to call him instead.
I don't know how I'd feel about the remake. I've had the major differences described to me and I approve of anything that gives Amy a character and decreases my fervent desire to kick Charley repeatedly in the ass, but I can't imagine anyone but McDowall as Peter Vincent and modernizing the character from a horror host to a stage magician does not get around the problem so much as it confuses me. I am not sure the two professions occupy the same pop-cultural niche, and there are such valuable parallels in the original between the real vampire and the make-believe vampire killer that I'm not sure what would replace them in the new formulation. I may still try it at some point, just for comparison's sake. But I am glad of the original. Its nominal protagonist just isn't the character I like it for.
1. If Ed starts the film as Charley's Renfield, as Gemma has suggested, then what he becomes is Jerry's Lucy. The vampire folds him close in his stylish trenchcoat like a bride in the black wings of a cloak.
2. That in itself is not a take on vampirism I've seen often, but I really like how it makes subtle, delightful hindsight sense of all the fruit we've seen Jerry eat throughout the film, much more often than we've seen him drink blood—it wasn't a smokescreen for his hematophagic habits, it's the other half of his diet. I love him coming downstairs at dusk, yawning and catching an orange tossed to him by his Renfield-boyfriend Billy (Jonathan Stark, doing a great job of looking like the practical human one in the relationship until all of a sudden he doesn't); it's such an ordinary, domestic moment, it becomes all the more perverse.
3. Here I refer anyone who hasn't already seen it (and anyone who has; it stands up to repeat viewing) to My Favorite Year (1982), with Peter O'Toole. I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!
4. There more than anywhere else in the film I can see McDowall channeling Peter Cushing: what it costs Van Helsing to hold Dracula down with that makeshift candlestick cross and know he can't let up. The most authentic moments of vampire-hunting are not necessarily the confident ones.
I had no idea there were any photographs of onna-bugeisha.fleurdelis28 found this one for me. I think I'm going to lie down now.
derspatchel—he spent Sunday through Tuesday coughing like a consumptive, I just have a viciously sore throat and more of a fever than my thermometer felt like telling me. (According to it, I've been running cold since last night. According to the doctor's office, respectable fever. I wonder what that means last night's minor fever really was.) I have actual doctor's orders to drink lots of liquids and do nothing. I'm trying.1. My poem "After the Red Sea" has been accepted by Goblin Fruit. It has Yiddish in it. I don't know if it's speculative or not. It is one of the recent poems about which I feel most strongly and I am very glad it has a home. That is one of the things it is about.
2.
rose_lemberg and shweta_narayan have something to say about editor confidentiality.3. Even after I signed off the internet last night, I couldn't get anything done, so I lay on the couch with a loudly purring cat in my arms and watched Fright Night (1985). Comments below adapted from stream-of-consciousness sleep-starved e-mail I sent
handful_ofdust around four in the morning. I didn't sleep very much at all.There are two major problems with Fright Night and unfortunately they are impossible to avoid; they're the central couple. I would have been about eighteen zillion percent more sympathetic to the protagonist Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) if he had not been introduced pressuring his girlfriend into sex she clearly isn't ready to have. Seriously, we fade in past the title cards and pan slowly across Charley's bedroom with all its adolescent clutter, some sub-Hammer horror is playing on late-night TV and the two of them are half-watching, making out on the floor, and the first thing we see as the story starts is Charley repeatedly sneaking his hand up under Amy's shirt as she keeps prying his fingers off. Finally she pushes him off her, firmly—"Charley, I said stop it!"—and he explodes: "Jesus, give me a break, Amy! We've been going together for a year and all I hear is 'Charley, stop it!'" Doesn't matter how many vampires he sees after that, I'm fine with all of them eating him. Meanwhile, as wide-eyed trophy-next-door Amy, Amanda Bearse is stuck in a script where she could have been replaced by a blender without any perceptible difference to the plot, except that then the writers would have needed to explain why there's a scene where Chris Sarandon makes love to a blender. Her most interesting moment is her response to the vampire's seduction: between one beat and the next she goes from mesmerized to knowing, slowly folding back the collar of her dress. I suspect we are not meant to cheer her on for her obviously superior taste, but between a monster and a pushy, whiny creeper, are you telling me there's a question? Any time the film was trying to behave like an '80's teen comedy, I wanted to stake it and set it on fire myself.
(I make an exception for Stephen Geoffreys' "Evil" Ed, even when he has to share screentime with his pointless age-mates—cocky, nervy, misfit and consciously annoying, with his sleeveless Goth T-shirts and his bedroom full of holograms and models, he's an awkward, convincing teenager and the silent intensity of his reactions to the vampire's proposition makes a compelling case for his reasons to accept. You don't have to be afraid of me. I understand what it's like being different. They won't pick on you anymore, or beat you up—I'll see to that. All you have to do is take my hand. Here, Edward. Take my hand. He reaches for the slender, claw-thorned fingers as if they're the only lifeline anyone has ever offered him, tear-stained and shaking; he buries himself under the vampire's coat as though he's come home.1 I rather liked the ending the film gives him.
derspatchel pointed out, and I think rightly, that Nick Frost and Simon Pegg must have seen this movie sometime.)When it behaves like a horror film aware of its conventions, however, Fright Night is almost above reproach. I haven't seen many monsters like Chris Sarandon's Jerry Dandridge. He's not an exotic vampire, with his sweaters and his scarves and his urban American accent, nor is he camouflaged by anything other than the cynicism of the times; he's amiable, casual, very handsome and very much of his decade, and he's not human, at all. Very likely he never was. When the finale's sunlight blasts him down to the traditional bones, what hangs there burning looks like nothing so much as the skeleton of a monstrous, man-sized bat.2 And he's queer-coded, with his "live-in carpenter," his easy negotiation of the club scene, and his successful appeal to Ed's awareness of "difference," but he drinks comfortably from female prostitutes and nothing in their scenes together suggests his attraction to Amy is not genuine. He has portraits on his wall of women across the ages who look just like her; who might be the same woman. Billy says sympathetically, watching Amy leave the crumbling old Victorian fixer-upper that the two of them have occupied like Dracula at Carfax: "Looks just like her, doesn't she?" Vampirism as sexual deviance is familiar. Jerry's metaphor is more complicated.
And then there's Roddy McDowall. I imprinted on him with The Legend of Hell House (1973) and I love him here, playing fifteen years older and at least three times hammier than he was in real life. The archetype of the actor called on to become for real what they've always played at being is one of the metafictional classics,3 but it is a gift from the gods of character acting that in addition to being expectedly out of his depth when faced with a real vampire, Peter Vincent is kind of a weasel about getting there in the first place. A former horror stalwart who staked many a busty vampire on the Technicolor screen, now the fading host of the late-night nostalgia-fest Fright Night Theatre, he's just been fired, he's facing eviction, he's bitter about the way the horror genre is trending, and he takes five hundred dollars from a high school kid to hoax her boyfriend about the vampire next door. The audience knows he has to come through as a hero eventually, but it takes him much, much longer than anyone is hoping, onscreen or off—there's at least one more waspish refusal and one more panicky collapse than the standard progression. And yet he's the kind of character it's impossible not to describe as a sweetheart, impulse to pack his bags and flee notwithstanding.
So it is especially appropriate to the reluctant hero's arc that he cannot simply assume the persona of "Peter Vincent, the Great Vampire Killer," even though that function is precisely what Charley and the narrative demand of him. He repeats the name to himself like a mantra as he enters the Dandridge house, carrying with him the props he used in his movies, dressed for the part, but the reality is unsurprisingly and satisfyingly messier. There is no stern, cold command in him as he watches a staked vampire slowly die; it's a grotesque, prolonged process, Peter's face is creased with distress and disgust and pity, and more than once he almost reaches out to take the creature's hand or pull out the stake, either of which would be suicidal, but you can't have an ounce of human compassion and not want to save someone choking on their own blood.4 When he finally gets that apotropaic trick with the cross to work on Jerry, backed by the powers of faith and sheer terror, his mouth keeps pulling into an incredulous little smile, as though he can't believe it's really working. (Fright Night is not a religious movie, I feel I should point out; there's more talk of God in Terence Fisher's Dracula (1958). When Jerry dismisses Peter and his fancy crucifix with the withering "You have to have faith for that to work on me," he never specifies faith in what. Quite possibly it's just faith in the truth of vampirism, that any of this mishegos of folkways works the way it's supposed to: crosses, mirrors, invitations, bats. At a doubtful moment, Peter reassures himself and Charley not so much with genre savvy, but wishful thinking: "Well, so far everything's been like it was in the movies. We'll just have to keep hoping!") He's always scared and he frequently crumbles and he's not, by McDowall's own admission, even a very good actor. I love the clips we see of his old movies, which are pretty much exactly the sort of thing Peter Cushing would have starred in if his career had gone straight into the toilet after Brides of Dracula (1960). His levels of sincerity can be gauged by the affectation of his accent. He looks much better in his tweedy jackets and cardigans than he does in full Victorian vampire-hunting drag. He's immensely endearing. And I like that we never learn his name. "Peter Vincent" is the character, but he doesn't tell us what to call him instead.
I don't know how I'd feel about the remake. I've had the major differences described to me and I approve of anything that gives Amy a character and decreases my fervent desire to kick Charley repeatedly in the ass, but I can't imagine anyone but McDowall as Peter Vincent and modernizing the character from a horror host to a stage magician does not get around the problem so much as it confuses me. I am not sure the two professions occupy the same pop-cultural niche, and there are such valuable parallels in the original between the real vampire and the make-believe vampire killer that I'm not sure what would replace them in the new formulation. I may still try it at some point, just for comparison's sake. But I am glad of the original. Its nominal protagonist just isn't the character I like it for.
1. If Ed starts the film as Charley's Renfield, as Gemma has suggested, then what he becomes is Jerry's Lucy. The vampire folds him close in his stylish trenchcoat like a bride in the black wings of a cloak.
2. That in itself is not a take on vampirism I've seen often, but I really like how it makes subtle, delightful hindsight sense of all the fruit we've seen Jerry eat throughout the film, much more often than we've seen him drink blood—it wasn't a smokescreen for his hematophagic habits, it's the other half of his diet. I love him coming downstairs at dusk, yawning and catching an orange tossed to him by his Renfield-boyfriend Billy (Jonathan Stark, doing a great job of looking like the practical human one in the relationship until all of a sudden he doesn't); it's such an ordinary, domestic moment, it becomes all the more perverse.
3. Here I refer anyone who hasn't already seen it (and anyone who has; it stands up to repeat viewing) to My Favorite Year (1982), with Peter O'Toole. I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!
4. There more than anywhere else in the film I can see McDowall channeling Peter Cushing: what it costs Van Helsing to hold Dracula down with that makeshift candlestick cross and know he can't let up. The most authentic moments of vampire-hunting are not necessarily the confident ones.
I had no idea there were any photographs of onna-bugeisha.
fleurdelis28 found this one for me. I think I'm going to lie down now.