Jenifer's Body

Saw Jenifer's Body last night.
Quick thoughts:
Some of the shots were a little over done. It was a disappointment because the ultimate scene in the movie was the worst example of this.
I really enjoyed the overall feel of the film though. It just did not feel like a normal horror movie. I think that helped it a lot.

Final Judgment:
I have seen a lot of hatred for this film on-line. Boy am I glad I did not listen to them. It was a good experience watching this movie with my wife.
Was it scary? Not really. Was it creepy? Yeah. Anyone that reads my blog can tell you that matters more to me then "scares."

Rant

Now I know this is supposed to be about horror and all but this kind of has to do with writing and fiction. Plus, I think this is horrible:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5TE99sAbwM

See what I am saying. Horrible.

I tried to keep this over on my Facebook but it was too long, so here it is.

Lets talk about Internal Logic.

The Bible is a big book, story, myth right. [If that statement offends, stand the fuck by.] It has a narrative like other books.

I read a lot of fantasy, horror, and superhero related comics... These are all flights of fancy that happen in their own worlds. These worlds have their own strange rules that make them dissimilar from our own. They establish these with an Internal Logic.

In Green Lantern, his ring does not effect yellow objects. In (most) vampire fiction stakes, sunlight, and beheadings kill them. In Star Wars the Force is a all encompassing metaphysical force that permeates all life. These works take whole novels, episodes, or issues establishing these things as facts, or rules within their own logical frameworks.

The Bible does that too. God is faith, love, and hope. He is perfect. Countless stories set this up.

Pat Robertson apparently has thrown out all of this. His god is a mean, vengeful bastard. He reached down out of heaven and swatted Haiti. He did it because (true story) their ancestors made a pact with the devil. Talk about some spiteful shit.

"Revenge is a dish best served cold... And acted against people who may not even have any idea what they are being punished for. Bwa-ha-ha!"

Even for a comic book villain this is trite and simplistic.

I hate qualifying things, but I think here it is a good and appropriate thing to do.

For the Christians reading this:

I am not saying your god did this. I am saying that Pat Robertson says his did. He is throwing out all the Internal Logic of the Bible (that next week he is going to hold up as fact on his show) and saying that God is in something akin to a Klingon Blood Feud with Haiti.

*

I cannot stand it when I am reading a book, for example a vampire novel, where in the first few pages a vampire gets staked, nothing happens, he does not die, and I feel the writer was looking for me to be shocked. Why would I be? Do vampires die when they are staked in this book's universe, its reality? I don't know mister writer. You have not told me.

In the Matrix (great movie with terrible sequels) it is established what the characters can and cannot do. It is hammered home for most of the movie. So when Neo finally starts going all Bad-Ass at the end, taking on Smith we can be shocked right along with the characters in the movie. [Smith looks REALLY shocked.] They established an Internal Logic, built it up and made it the reality we were viewing. When they shattered it we generally had reason to be surprised.

What does that have to do with Pat Robertson?

I do not believe the man understands the core principles (the Internal Logic) of the book he is trying to teach us on a daily basis. When he says crap like this (which is being added to his long list of Dumb-Ass Quotes as #317) it tweaks that same nerve in my head that get irritated when I read a book like the "vampire novel" described above.

*

It may seem odd to compare this outrage with the outrage I feel over a bad book I am reading, but I get pretty flaming mad when I read a bad book. I get especially peeved off when a book does just this thing.

I am a Geek, what else do I have to say. One of the tell-tale signs of being a geek is getting way madder then you should about your passions.

Don't believe me? Go to a sci-fi, gaming, or comic convention. Wait till you see a guy with vulcan ears near a guy wearing a Battlestar Galactica t-shirt. Ask them if the Borg could beat the Cylons in an all out war. Step back and watch the insanity...

I can laugh at it but then I catch my self getting red in the face over a writer relying way too much on adverbs.

Which, by the way:

Adverbs are the Cheap-Whore Cousins of adjectives. They are the equivalent of flashy special effects in a movie.

"Sure there is no story, the characters are two dimensional, and I couldn't care a lick to ever see it again, but damn the CG was fantastic!"

*

Okay, I'm done for now. I just needed to express why this angered up my blood so much.

Of course, no I am mad as hell at adverbs.

Sometimes when I read particular authors I find myself getting nervous. I turn each page with just a little dread. One author who does this to me is Richard Laymon.

The first book of his that I read was The Cellar. While not going into too much detail, it was a pretty typical kind of horror story. He peppered the entire work with a lot of recognizable tropes and character types that I have read in hundreds of other books. It felt pretty common, comforting. I knew where the story was going. It was a certainty.

Then the book ended on one of the most unsettling, discomforting moments I have read in a horror story. It was not gory or flamboyant. It was abrupt and dark. It was simple and it was full of implications that crept into my head. Then it nested there.

I shut the book and felt as if I had been duped. He tricked me. That old bastard tricked me. He told me what to expect with those characters. He laid them out and promised me through their commonness how things were going to play out. Then he yanked the rug out and I was left in the middle of the darkness, sitting on a sore butt.

Occasionally I will find myself replaying the last scene in my head. I will see it, hear it, and feel just like I did that first time. I recall it every time I pick up one of his books. There is no comfort in them now. I know I can't trust him.

I love him for it, like a college girl dating a shifty drug dealer. I love my bad boy authors. They shower me with kisses and hug me tight. They lead me down the path, only to leave before I wake up, stealing my X-Box and my cash. Yet I keep taking them back.

Some of Laymon's books are really good Trash Horror novels. Others warrant no more then a simple shrug from me. Still I pick up his books and devour them without hesitation. They give me what I want. They give me those unsettled shivers, that excitement only a bad boy can.

Idea Gremilins

I have started to ask myself where in the world I get ideas from. As I understand the story: published, successful author types get sick, real quick of the question. I have had some good ideas, but I cannot even start to catalog where they come from. The story I am working on now came to me on the john going number 2. Now that I recall, the last really good idea before that came on the can... Going number 2 as well. Hm?
It's crude, very crude. The jokes write themselves too: maybe I should have flushed them with the rest of the shit. Ha Fucking Ha.

*

I have often come to a story idea by asking myself "what is scary?" That question is often left unasked yet answered as something comes up and creeps me out or unsettles me.
Being scared eats at my insides as it happens. As soon as it is over I find myself wanting it all again, dreading it at the same time. When it happens, I want to get at the heart of it and show it to someone else.
There it is, the reason I write.
Still, what scares is not an idea for a story. The closer you get to the root of what the "scare" is, the less of a story you have. Deep emotional loss is scary, not a plot. It is a seed that I plant in dark wet soil. Then it grows. How it grows is the question.
I get the scare, then find a vehicle for it to drive. The characters, the locales, the scenery, trappings, events, plots, and the twists. They ride like a convoy, the scare at the head of it. They all need to help give it weight, momentum. They push it home.
I have found the vehicle first a few times, which works, but I have to remember to ask the question in reverse. "What is scary about this?" A convoy without a driver goes nowhere.
I have never come by it mechanically. Never laid out the plans of what kind of story I was going to write.
"Today I am telling the tale of three sisters going through midlife trouble."
More often a notion hits, I plant, it grows, and a tale is told. Sometimes it is broad concepts that get filled in through careful consideration. Other times that notion is a full blown idea with characters (named or unnamed) and plot all laid out.
Those big movies, that blurt out in the theater behind my eyes, are the ones that lead to these questions. Where the hell did all that come from?
I feel as if there is a little gremlin sitting at a writing desk in my head, churning out pages, and bouncing his ideas off me like a pitch man.
"The next great gremlin novel!" He assures me, every time. "Huge seller."

*

Reading what I have written here, I wonder if any of this is getting me any closer to an answer? Don't know.
My ideas just come. Does it really matter how? Being truthful with myself I am saying no. It does not matter.
Well, then fuck it.
Looking at yourself, as a writer, and delving into what makes you work is always good for something. Now, whenever writer's block comes I have got the solution. A good idea is right around the corner, after a trip to Taco Hell and a nice long sit on the crapper. That always gets the gremlin working.

Post #1

I am a horror writer. That means I traffic in tales that scare, creep-out, unsettle, and entertain their readers. My horror is not cute or coy. It is about the macabre. Other themes populate my stories, but their hearts are always that genre of the bizarre, and the dreadful.

Horror is in me, boiling and spilling out all over the page whenever I write. Even when I try to write outside the corral of horror it seeps into my prose.

I am scary, creepy, and unsettling. I am not cute or coy. I love the macabre. Most of my tastes tend toward the bizarre and the dreadful. That is me. I am horror and have decided that I love that about myself.

I am not alone. There are others just like me. In no way am I the central authority in the “horror universe.” I am not even published yet. (I will be, but not yet.)

This blog is here for the purpose of chronicling my journey to get published, to get my horrors out there to the world. It is also my journey, as a writer, toward being the best I can be at what I do.

What I am putting here for everyone to see are my thoughts and personal discoveries on horror and what is happening with my career. This post is an introduction and an opportunity for you to see what this is all about.

To further that, I am making this deceleration:

I am affirming that my horror will always be about scaring, creeping out, unsettling, and entertaining.

I affirm that this blog will always be about my horror.

I affirm that I will never take all of this too seriously. I will remember this all started under the covers, with a flashlight, a paperback book, and a scared kid.

For clarity sake let me point out some things so no one gets the wrong idea.

One. I am not goth. (I don't look good in make-up.) I am not sad, depressed,or sure of the universe's unwavering existentialist cruelty.

Two. My type of horror is not about promiscuous vampire hunters who get it on with the “creatures of the night,” or most other stories of that type.

Three. I have discovered that there are horror novels that are not that much about horror. Their purpose seems to be about gaining the approval of some mythical group of intellectuals. My type of horror's singular purpose is laid out above in the second sentence of the first paragraph.

Fourth and finally, I am not going to qualify anything else I put in this blog with statements such as “in my opinion,” "IMHO," “this is just what I think,” or “I'm sure not all of 'x' (or 'x's') are like this but...” If something I put in this blog ever offends you, pisses you off or otherwise destroys your sense of inner-peace just add the following statement, in your mind's eye, to the end of whatever it was that put you in that state:

“I am sorry that your life, self esteem, and/or well-being was so fragile that the words on your computer screen were enough to blow your shit up. Maybe you should reconsider your continuing participation in this thing called the internet."

I hope that your type of horror shares something with mine. If it does, the plan is to post at least every five days. Thanks for taking the ride with me.

Macabre –adjective

1.	gruesome and horrifying; ghastly; horrible.

2.	of, pertaining to, dealing with, or representing death, esp. its grimmer or uglier aspect.

3.	of or suggestive of the allegorical dance of death.