Posts from — February 2008

(Male, 30’s) I’m an art teacher. Let’s just leave it at that. In the dream, I went to school one day and I entered my classroom as usual when someone jumps me. This person gets me in a head lock, bends me over and starts questioning me. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I choked out some answers but the answers didn’t satisfy my attacker. Then I realize that the person who has me in this choke hold is another teacher, one of the business teachers in fact. I try to explain “This used to be my room. This used to be my room!” When I woke I could still feel the hands around my throat… because I had my own hands on my throat. Weird. I must be worried about layoffs or something.

(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if I can explain how disturbing this dream was, amusing too but disturbing. Maybe if you’ve ever had to evaluate a large amount of someone else’s work it might make a bit of sense. I was reading and grading a very large stack of high school English papers. This part isn’t strange because I’m a high school English teacher. I was writing a lot of comments on each paper, nearly a page handwritten for each paper. But I must have mixed up the stacks of which ones I’d finished, or maybe I put the finished papers on the bottom of the stack but for whatever reason that graded papers got mixed up with the ungraded papers. Pretty soon I found myself writing comments ABOUT MY OWN COMMENTS. I discovered that half way through the stack so I figured I should finish the whole set. But I lost track and pretty soon started commenting again on my own commented comments. Clearly this was going to keep going on for quite some time.

(Male, 40’s) I was chasing someone through these very dark, black streets that were also slick with rain. I had lost the trail and was a bit lost when I realized I wasn’t in a city at all. What I thought all along was the city scape of buildings was actually a long backdrop painting. The canvas was stretched all along the side of a large semi trailer. Then I looked around me and realized that everything I had been running through, everything that had felt like a city was actually just cutout flats on a very very small stage. How could I have ever taken that to be the street I was running down?

I looked back at the back drop and noticed that it had been slashed with huge long cuts running lengthwise. The truck was in the middle of a field. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing else as far as the eye could see. Then there was a young woman. She had very straight, plain blond hair about shoulder length… and a HUGE knife, easily a foot long that she waved around like she was very comfortable with it. It was clear that she was the one who had sliced up the backdrop. She wanted me to stay and talk but I said No I had to head back to town because I had to pee. She laughed and said “You’re in a field. Just go ahead and pee here.” I replied, still eager to get the heck away from her “You just want to see my penis.” She replies by grabbing the back of her t-shirt and pulling it off in one smooth movement so she’s standing there, topless and bare-breasted still brandishing this immense knife. I am absolutely terrified — I don’t want to piss her off but I don’t have a clue what to do.

(The Grim Gnome) I don’t like vampires, generally speaking. The whole rule-bound / old-world / invitation-only aspects make them about as scary as a supernatural Certified Public Accountant. Except for the ones in “30 Days of Night.” If you haven’t heard of this series you either have been moldering away in a casket or you’re metaphysically immune to the effects of horror-culture. A few years back, writer Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith wove together a freshly twisted premise with spattery exuberant artwork and pumped life back into the genre of the horror comic. The fresh twist on the vampire rules that gets “30 Days of Night” rolling is obvious from the title; if vampires hate sunlight, then what if they attacked a place that didn’t have much of it, say, a city located near the Arctic circle? What if a whole ragtag clan of vampires threw a party of sorts during the month of darkness and attacked the whole town. Add human hero. Stir well. Garnish with a nasty skewer at the end and, heck that’s what started the juggernaut. I really have to recommend it. Quite highly.

A sequel picked up the storyline and propelled it forward, again ending with a sickening little twist. And a third, completing a classical trilogy, right? If I understand the chronology correctly, the movie started development around this time and the comics kept coming. A collection of tales appeared, including a rather dumb one about vampires in space. Some of these feature artists other than Templesmith and honestly, I feel cheated with those issues, especially cheated when the artist is attempting to make work that sort of / kind of / almost resembles Templesmith’s art. So though I can’t highly recommend them all — one reason I can’t is because they’re STILL making new ones — I still have to confess I’ve bought and savored every one of them.

Niles’s other comics are nothing to ignore… but for the moment I WILL ignore them, or to be more exact I’ll postpone looking at them until another post. Who knew that comics would work so well for horror? I sure didn’t. I thought the EC’s Crypt Keeper was just weird and, OK, so I was afraid of “The Tomb of Dracula” but I was kid back then. I even thought “Dark Shadows” was scary.

And then there’s the “30 Days of Night” movie. I admit that I felt an actual quiver of excitement when I first heard Sam (”Army of Darkness”) Raimi’s name connected with the project. Alas, it was only as a producer. There are parts of the movie that are very good. For instance, some of the shots are very haunting, like an aerial tracking shot that shows the carnage of the initial attack. And throughout the movies human faces seem to have unusually de-saturated color which makes everyone look cold .. and then also makes the blood really pop out. And I really appreciated that at least a couple times when humans were standing outside in sub-zero temperatures that there were clouds of condensation when they breathed or spoke. As curmudgeonly northerner, I can’t STAND fake winters on screen. My comments don’t sound like a love-fest, though do they? Perhaps I’m grumpy for paying good money to see the movie in the theatre. I’m a stingy curmudgeon. But furthermore, I can’t help but thinking that the comic book was scarier. There was a LOT of back story in the comic book that was simply removed for the movie, so much that there doesn’t seem to be much possibility for a sequel. I was honestly pretty shocked that so much editing was required because I don’t usually consider comics to be that dense when it comes to story line.

“30 Days of Night” - the movie - comes out on video this week. Though I don’t feel unusually COMPELLED to see the movie again when it comes out on video, if I’m honest with myself, I’m pretty sure I will. If for no other reason than it will remind me of how much I loved the original comic.

(Male, 20’s) I had a partner, a woman with medium length blond hair, and we were running after a man. We were in a long corridor and every so often, there was a set of doors. We’d run through them and we’d see him just going through the next set. We kept running and chasing him. Finally, we saw him going through a set of doors that opened into bright daylight so we knew he was going outside. When we went through those doors we were on the roof top of a building and we could see the man over by a smokestack. He was climbing up a ladder on the side of the smoke stack and when he reached the top, he pushed aside a lid that was on the smokestack and he climbed inside. We followed.

Inside the smokestack was a vine. We started climbing down the vine, still in pursuit of the man. We climbed for what felt was like hours, even though I know it must have just been a couple minutes. It was a dry brown vine and eventually we reached the end of it. There was a little gap and then another vine started. We though we could easily jump from one vine to the other one but we didn’t know that gravity changed between the two vines. What was “up” became “down” so halfway through our jump, we were jumping “up.” But we were able to grab the other vine and continue the chase UP a vine. Again we climbed for hours and at the end of the smokestack, we pushed aside the lid and found ourselves in a very dense jungle.

Then something else must have happened but the next part I remember, I was in the dense jungle and the man I was chasing was yelling at me, saying “Come on. Come on! We’ve got what we came for.” A dark and scary looking cloud was bearing down on us. And I was holding the decapitated head of my female partner, tucked under my arm like a football. I had no idea what had happened but the man was very insistent. We started climbing down the smokestack again back to the normal world. Once we had gone a little way, once I was sure that the cloud wasn’t following us, I said “We’ve got to go back.” The man took the head I was holding and pushed back the hair to reveal the scalp. There were eight things there, though I can only remember one. There were some Mardi Gras beads woven in between the tufts of hair. “See, we’ve got what we came for.” We continued climbing, climbing back to our world.

(The Grim Gnome) A couple weeks ago I linked to the first episode of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a delicious satire on horror TV. Here’s episode two.

Garth Marenghi’s “Dark Place” Episode 2