Posts from — October 2007

(Female, 40’s) My teenaged daughter and I were on a trip to Toronto together. We were staying in a hotel downtown and going to attend a play in which a friend of hers from high school was performing. We were on our way to the play, which was to be held at a big church far from downtown. We got as far as standing outside the huge church, an old fashioned colonial brick-style building that was surrounded by a wide lawn spotted with huge, old trees in full fall colors. My daughter remembered that she’d left something back at the hotel, something she needed desperately, so we started on the trip back to the hotel, hurrying, because we thought that we could make it back again in time for the play.

We walked for a long while, then we took a bus, then the subway. Then we came above ground and I looked around for the streetcar stop, but everything was different. We started walking, thinking that our hotel was nearby, wandering really. We went far enough that I realized we had been heading in the opposite direction. Along the beach, we saw piles of skeletons, a stack of bare white bones on the sand, and I told my daughter that that was from last winter’s storms!!

Then I thought I knew a short cut back to our hotel. We went into a shopping center and across some walkways and made a series of turns, and suddenly we were inside a children’s hospital. I asked a nurse if there was a way out of there. She looked at us very skeptically, and pointed to an elevator. My daughter walked in, though these plastic flaps that were not like real elevator doors, and pushed a button. I jumped in as the elevator started to descend. She told me it was freight elevator, not a people elevator.

…”You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted…

We came out of the building in a parking lot surrounded by a fence. So we went back into the building to go out the front door. We walked a long time, down a bunch of different hallways, looking for an exit. Finally, up ahead, I saw a staircase and a woman carrying a laundry basket. We hurried to the end of the hall, which narrowed as we went. The end was covered with thick wire mesh: you could see those stairs but you couldn’t get to them. I asked the woman, “How do we get over there?” “You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted. So she pointed to a door.

We went through the door and we found ourselves in the basement of a house. We followed the woman up the stairs. She was the mother of the family, now widowed, and she lived in the house with her teenaged son and daughter and another daughter who was 6 or 7. The house was full of all sorts of objects; it looked like a very crowded museum.
The woman began to bring out newspaper articles and programs to show us that she was a very famous musician. We said we had to get going because of the play! But the family looked at each other and smiled. “I’m sorry but there’s no way to leave. We are all trapped here. We never can go out. The house will not let us leave. ”

I looked around. All of the windows were covered with an incredibly thick ivy. They couldn’t be opened at all. The backdoor lead down to the basement, the basement where we’d come in from the hospital basement, maybe, but the door we came through had no doorknob on the inside. I opened the front door and stepped outside. There was a
small cement porch with a short brick wall around the perimeter and a rusty wrought iron gate opening to a sidewalk. I could see the whole city from where I stood. It smelled so good to be outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw the family standing inside the door, watching me. I started walking toward the sidewalk. As I did, the
wrought iron gate reached out and grabbed me and held on. I twisted and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go. It gripped and stretched, wrestling with me, until I was panting and sweating. When I backed up, toward the porch, it let go. If I moved again toward the sidewalk, it grabbed me. I want back inside where the family and my daughter were waiting. “Do you see what we mean?”

We stood there in the hallway, trying to assess the situation. “What about food? How do you get groceries?” “Boxes of groceries get dropped off in the yard.” Their crazy claim seemed to be true. Then I saw a metal switch that I hadn’t seem before, like a built-in key that you could turn. I thought maybe that was the way out. So I turned it. A whole series of gears began spinning like I’d set an enormous machine in motion. There were these shiny columns composed
of hundreds of little gears all turning. A huge rumbling noise came up from the basement and a heavy metal drawbridge covered the front door and held it shut permanently.

(Male, 30’s) I woke heart racing and all I could think was, “Finally, something to send to the Grim Gnome!”

In an earlier thread of the dream I’d developed an unseemly crush on a Japanese lady I’d just met. This had just come to a close and I was feeling rather proud of myself for ceasing the flirtation as I wandered along some quasi-Boston streets that gave off a Venice vibe. The classic brownstones and familiar streets ran into what should’ve been the Charles River, sometimes neatly with sun-dappled willows lining unexpected parkways, other times the pavement and sidewalk terminating abruptly and requiring backtracking to equally unexpected bridges that crossed and recrossed the brown water.

My memory is fading somewhat but it was on this bit of walk that I began chatting with some college girl also walking there. My age hits me a bit; I’m not old, but she’s young enough to be right out as far as flirtation goes. The chatter is very much on the up and up end of small talk and so when we get to her house there’s nothing to read into her invitation for me to come in and meet her family. That being said, I’m constantly pushing to the back of my mind entirely inappropriate thoughts about how hot she is. Hawt. Very. Mm.

And something feels wrong, but I chalk it up to the inappropriate feelings. Still, crossing the threshold into her house, it’s hard to shake, this sense of wrongness. She’s talking about how she wants me to meet her grandmother, her parents, her brother. Something is out of place. The mood has inexplicably shifted.

I’m not kept in suspense long. We walk down the a tastefully appointed hallway and come to a bizarre room. The floor drops off to the right as though partially demolished and one can see the room below. To the left, opening directly onto the hallway are two rooms. As we approach, the contents of the nearest one remain obscured but the further one holds a woman. She’s sitting in a chair, wearing a white shift and as we draw nearer I can see that she’s an aged woman,
starved, with wirey grey and black hair tangled over a seamed face and eyes so sunken in their sockets as to almost be pits. In my shock I realize the girl who’s brought me here has stopped talking. She had been going a mile-a-minute practically since I met her, and now nothing. Am I looking at her grandmother? The horrible sense of wrongness comes over me again.

There’s a sort of noise from the storey below and I look down into the room and see a siamese twin, male and female, connected at the shoulder and torso. Both appear to be imbeciles but in good health - an impossibility given that one of the torsos ends in a twist of vertebrae. The sight is almost comic, like a really bad horror movie prop, but for some reason I know this set of twins is the girl’s parents. There’s something I don’t quite recall about her brother, who I saw next, a memory of something spiderish that’s swept aside as I realize I’ve come far enough to turn around and see the contents of the last room. There, scant feet from me is a creature that (now that I’m awake) I can only assume was inspired by Mattheson’s White Silk. It sat in a Victorian wheelchair, unable to rise. The hands were large, mis-shapen, pocked and clawed. The face was spider-eyed; there were no lips, no cheeks, just long, flat teeth like rodent’s incisors running the whole rim of the upper jaw. This was Grandmother; the other old woman was food.

I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house.

Naturally, I lost my shit. I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house. I made it to a room in which there was a ridiculously small window through which I know I should have been able to make myself fit, but I spent to long considering its smallness. When I quantified it as eight inches by four I knew I’d doomed myself. That’s simply impossible to fit through. The girl came to the room, all wolfish arousal and I tried to get a grip on how I was going to get out of this. As I played along with her entendres my mind scrabbled at my predicament the same way my hands had crabbed at the shrinking window moments earlier. Even though she knew I knew about her family I was still alive, so there were rules to this, if not reason.

I realized I was in a fairy tale. A misbegotten offshoot the Grimm Brothers. Had I actually heard this one somewhere? What were the rules for this story? She was panting and the climax which would either result in my escape or my demise was fast approaching. What to do? Continue? Flee? I was the Jack of every fable and had to come up with the unexpected solution…

And I woke up. Helluva dream.

My affection for werewolf tales is no secret.  Stories of tormented creatures of one kind who transform into tormented creatures of another kind speak deeply about so many of the profound changes we endure.  Or should I say they *can* speak deeply about such things.  So often, werewolf stories stink.  But that’s never dulled my affection.

So I was delighted to find a blog devoted solely to werewolf movies.  (http://www.werewolf-movies.com)  It doesn’t have the largest collection of reviews or articles yet but it sure seems headed in the right direction.  I also really appreciated the generous links section which has clued me into various different facets of werewolf related culture.

(Male, mid 40’s) I was a member of a scientific field study, the first to go into an area over run with a strange new creature. This area was an old abandoned amusement park. As part of the initial de-briefing, we were shown a home movie. In the movie, a family is riding on a train that traverses a large open plain. Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs. They move quite gracefully and effortlessly and are programmed to have interactions like real creatures. It’s sort of like a marionette show with self-directed marionettes that are larger than a house. There are also other kinds of animals living on this plain to make it feel like a real place — jackals, gorillas, etc. Then all of a sudden in this movie, a high school kid jumps out of the train and goes running out into the plain. The lead investigator stops the home movie and comments: He was never seen again. And furthermore, he was her brother. He had been depressed and her family had gone to this amusement park during spring break to cheer him up. This was nine years ago. The scandal had forced the park to close but it had been impossible to close down the plains fully because the dinosaur robots ran on solar powered batteries and they still roamed the area. Plus the living creatures were supported by a self-sustaining ecosphere. We were being sent in to see what was up, I think half expecting that everything would be dead.

…Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs…

Clearly that wasn’t the case. There were about a half dozen of us and none of us carried weapons, just scientific gear, pens, paper… I was a little concerned that we watched the de-briefing movie while we were inside the plain because it gave the resident creatures plenty of time to come over and size us up. There were jackals roaming around behind us but everyone’s attention was drawn to these gorillas. There were four or five of them. Some had heads with albino hair on bodies of chocolate brown and some that the exactly reversed pattern. For some reason we took that to mean they had been assembled from parts, that these were mechanical. Perhaps the boy who ran away had assembled them. The creatures kept getting closer and closer to the team and everyone just kept standing around taking notes. Finally a gorilla stood up and hammered on his chest threateningly. We realized the danger we were in and started running off down the track toward the amusement park’s offices.

I’d never heard of Kwaidan (1965) before I checked it out this week. The DVD is released on the Criterion Collection so I knew it had to be nutritional, if not down right crunchy. It’s a pretty darned interesting film especially if you think that Japanese horror started with Ringu.

Kwaidan however, is an anthology, consisting of four separate stories all directed by Masaki Kobayashi, and as such it suffers the drawbacks of most anthology films. That is, at best it’s like a mini-film festival of short films and at worst they’re a bunch of unrelated stuff strung together. Kwaidan is more unified than many anthology films but it does feel really rather long. One suggestion that might sound heretical to cinema-snobs would be to watch each story separately, say, before watching another movie.

But Kwaidan works as a whole piece as well. Speaking personally, the stylistic unity was most effective. There is a gloriously theatrical sense to the movie; that is, it feels like it was mostly shot on a sound stage, one filled with meticulously constructed sets and folks in great costumes. For me, this sense of an artificial frame bolstered the “once upon a time” quality of the ghost stories. It’s a really different sensation than watching a lot of contemporary horror films that feel almost like documentaries and I found it quite refreshing.

I can’t say that Kwaidan is exactly scary but then I don’t find ANY ghost stories scary so much as sentimental. Better to say that it’s creepy and has many very nice, arresting images - exactly what I’d expect from a horror film on the Criterion Collection.

(Male, early 20’s) This one qualifies more as a weird dream, I think, than as an actual nightmare but it was vivid enough to keep me thinking about it all day.

There were these three small alligators playing in a dried up creek bed. The sand was a dark green and the little alligators were blue or at least they has a bluish color to them. A mother-alligator was watching over them. But all of a sudden another alligator showed up. It was huge and scary and it pushed the mother-alligator out of the way. The evil alligator was able to open its jaws so wide that they stretched from one side of the creek bed to the other which allowed the alligator children no way to escape. They were trapped and facing imminent death. The little alligators looked at each other and decided to charge. They ran straight into the mouth of the large alligator. They ran down his throat straight to its belly - I could see them bulging against the skin of the large alligator - but they didn’t stop at its belly. The small alligators kept running inside the large alligator down its tail until they reached the tip which they made look like an over-stuffed alligator-skinned bag.

That’s when the dream ended but I can imagine that a pretty one-sided battle continued with the large alligator being devoured from within by these three small but feisty creatures.