Harry found existence overrated, And its shadow, morality, so outdated, Scurrying rats down here in the sewer, Porcine gluttons in punished manure.
Grand aspirations from primordial slime, Lifting up the rock from time to time, Samson, destroying a temple of hypocrisy, And every pillar – hope, faith and charity,
They’d had him from baptism’s font, Trapped before wording his wants, A heel dipped in brackish liturgy, Silent collusion in mass duplicity.
For those who remained in smoky rubble? Rudely awakened from a cocoon bubble: An obelisk erected to grotesque finance, Charon’s fee for a Stygian dance.
A Winter’s tale of horrors profound, The haunted hotel’s dark tapestry, Supreme isolation’s moonscape snowbound, A father gripped by homicidal history.
He sought to write, heal, absolve sins, Overlooked the hotel’s Redrum plans, Vomiting up daymares of phantom twins, His mind possessed by unseen hands.
Room Two Three Seven, malevolent, Forbidden to enter its dark hole, Where ageless ladies bathed decadent, Luring caretakers to an adulterer’s role.
His wife and son sensed the danger, A bloody elevator with nowhere to run, A father’s warpath with axe and anger, He became the monster, the devil’s son.
It might horrify 42 ways from Sunday, Only his shining son grasped the fact, May as well be across the galaxy, As in a labyrinth with that maniac.
He failed to kill, he froze, met his fate, The hotel consumed his spirit as its own, Purgatorial torture in damnation’s bait, He smiled in the photo, eternally alone.
(Spoiler Alert: If you have never seen Apocalypse Now, this review contains spoilers and you may want to come back after you have seen it and read it then.)
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is a very loose reinterpretation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. It lifts the book’s basic premise of a boat trip up a river to confront a character named Kurtz whom the natives are in awe of. The novella’s African setting becomes a commentary on colonialism, and Kurtz is an ivory trader. The film transposes the scenario to the Vietnam War and is a scathing commentary on American involvement. Kurtz is now a renegade Special Forces Colonel who must be executed “with extreme prejudice.”
So you have the Conrad material at the root of the film. Over that comes screenwriter John Milius’s take on the material as an updated version of The Odyssey from Greek mythology, with the Playboy bunnies in the jungle as the sirens and Kilgore as the outwitted Cyclops (the stealing of his surfboard in a different cut of the film), etc.
There are also references to the American mindset remaining stuck in Frontier Wars with Native Americans; Robert Duvall wears a Stetson, and his unit is the Air Cavalry with helicopters instead of horses. One of the Playboy dancers is dressed as a cowgirl, with Stetson, white cowboy boots and a pair of six-shooters. (That analogy has become ever more overt in recent years with America’s use of Apache helicopters, Tomahawk missiles and even using the codename “Geronimo” for Osama bin Laden.)
On top of that, you get Milius’s take on the Vietnam conflict, with Coppola adding his viewpoint on the power structure and how it had changed from his Oscar-winning script of America’s World War II triumph in Patton (1970). The icing on the cake is Michael Herr’s brilliant written narration. (Herr, a Vietnam War correspondent for Esquire, published a book in 1977 called Dispatches which was called the best book written about the Vietnam War by The New York Times Book Review. Herr was brought in by Stanley Kubrick to co-write the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket in 1987.)
Martin Sheen’s character Willard says very little in the movie. His voiceover is a valuable insight into his internal monologue and his character’s confusion, frustration and cynicism with himself, the war, and his complicit participation in it with America. I would go so far as to say that it is the best voiceover narration I have ever heard in a movie. Like The Godfather, so many lines from Apocalypse have entered popular consciousness, especially the narration with its one-liners with their deep, biting aftertaste. The first-person voiceover is a narrative technique punted over from novels. It was also a staple of film noir where it could assist the writer in imparting dense exposition from the labyrinthine plot the detective was investigating. Here, Sheen’s Willard is as morally beaten up and jaded as any Bogart or Jack Nicholson gumshoe back in the States.
The character of Williard is a burnt-out assassin who has lost his raison d’être.
Oddly, with its synthesised score, narration, stunning visuals and the many different cuts of the film released over the years, Apocalypse Now reminds me of another movie with one of the worst voiceovers ever – Blade Runner.
A young George Lucas planned to direct Apocalypse Now at one stage in a black-and-white, handheld, 16mm, Cinéma vérité -style in Vietnam with the war still raging. When Star Wars skyrocketed, and Lucas found himself owning and running companies he had founded, like Industrial Light and Magic and THX Sound, on top of preparing to make the Star Wars sequels, he no longer had time to do Apocalypse. Coppola stepped in to save the film.
He went in a completely opposite direction from Lucas’s vision and made a David Lean-style Bridge on the River Kwai/ Lawrence of Arabia epic out of it.
Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro was an inspired choice by Coppola. His lush, vast photography is mesmerizing in the epic, earlier scenes and grows steadily more surreal as the characters near the deranged Kurtz’s hiding place. Storaro deservedly won an Oscar for his outstanding efforts.
Robert Duvall reunites with Francis Ford Coppola from The Godfather Parts I and II. Here though, he is not like Tom, the soft-spoken family lawyer. Duvall has a field day playing against type as Lieutenant Colonel William “Bill” Kilgore – a loud, macho, gung-ho, Kubrickian-type who would seem at home in Dr Strangelove. Kilgore, like Coppola’s Patton, loves war, and his greatest fear is “someday this war’s gonna end.” He can callously flick playing cards over dead and dying “gooks” and then stop giving water to a man holding his guts in with a pot lid when he hears Lance, a famous surfer from Willard’s boat, is there.
You could argue that Apocalypse is like a tripped-out, riverboat version of The Wizard of Oz, with the protagonists encountering a series of increasingly-bizarre characters and situations until a confrontation with the befuddled and underwhelming “man behind the curtain” – the Wizard/Kurtz.
When I first saw Apocalypse Now, I thought it was a great film, but with a disappointing ending. As I have gotten older, I find it more and more appropriate. The whole movie has been a slow build-up of the myth of both Kurtz and Marlon Brando. In a way, nothing could live up to it. He is just a man, in the end, and a very odd and lost one. He is not so much assassinated by Sheen’s character as butchered with a cudgel (the comparison is made with cuts to the real slaughter of a water buffalo that Coppola filmed.) Which enables Brando to indulge in yet another one of his prolonged, masochistic death scenes that he was famous for.
The movie Apocalypse Now shares similarities with the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Both works explore the themes of power, corruption, war’s moral ambiguity, and the descent into the darkness of the main characters. They also utilize the imagery of blood, darkness, and fire to establish a sense of horror and tragedy. (The boat the characters travel upriver on is called The Erebrus. According to Encyclopedia Britannica: “Erebus, also spelt Erebos, in Greek religion, the god of a dark region of the underworld and the personification of darkness. Erebus is one of the primordial beings in the Greek creation myth. He is the son of Chaos, who is also the mother of Erebus’s wife, Nyx, the personification of night.”) Both works also quote or reference other works. For example, Apocalypse Now quotes Macbeth’s famous line “The horror! The horror!” at the end of the film, while Macbeth references “the dismal and fatal end” of Julius Caesar’s assassination, which is also the title of another Shakespeare play (and a film adaptation that Brando had starred in, only it was the assassination of his character this time).
Dennis Hopper’s manic character has no name in the film, and is just called “Photojournalist.” He seems to be modelled on The Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear with some truth emerging in his ramblings. Lear abdicated his kingdom and you could argue that, in abandoning his command and his loyalty to his country to set up his own “kingdom” in Cambodia, Colonel Kurtz abdicated his responsibilities and descended into madness like Lear did with tragic consequences. Coppola had already said that he saw Vito Corleone in The Godfather as this great king who had to choose one of his three sons to succeed him, which is a very Lear-like description as he had three daughters to divide his kingdom among. Coppola would make the King Lear references more overt in The Godfather Part III with Sonny Corleone’s bastard son showing up like Edmund in King Lear and Michael ranting and raving during a thunderstorm like Lear on the heath.
Coppola also had a complicated relationship with Marlon Brando, who plays Colonel Kurtz in the film. Coppola had fought the studio tooth and nail to have Brando cast as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Brando was perfect in it, it was a huge hit, and Brando won and refused an Oscar for his performance. However, in Apocalypse Now, Brando was overweight, unprepared, and uncooperative. He refused to learn his lines or follow Coppola’s directions. He demanded a huge payment for his role and threatened to leave before finishing his scenes. Coppola could not think of an ending and had to improvise and edit around Brando’s performance to make it work. Coppola felt a sense of betrayal and he never worked with Marlon Brando again.
It was very sad, as Coppola was the closest Brando had come to finding another Elia Kazan to work with again. Kazan had really put Brando on the map in the 1950s, directing him in classic movies like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952) and On The Waterfront (1954). (Kazan fell out of favour after naming names at a HUAC anti-communist hearing. Some even refused to clap when he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar decades later.)
Brando would make one more movie, 1980’s The Formula (which starred another actor who’d refused an Oscar, George C. Scott), and then disappear off the screen for nine years, living off his massive paydays from The Missouri Breaks, Superman and Apocalypse Now in Tahiti:
The Missouri Breaks (1976): Brando received $1.25 million plus 11% of the gross for playing a bounty hunter in this western film directed by Arthur Penn. The film grossed $14 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $2.79 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $16.4 million in 2023.
Superman (1978): Brando received $3.7 million against a percentage of the gross for playing Jor-El, the father of Superman, in this superhero film directed by Richard Donner. The film grossed $300 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $14 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $67 million in 2023.
Apocalypse Now (1979): Brando received $2.5 million plus 8% of the gross over $30 million for playing Colonel Kurtz. The film grossed $150 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $11.6 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $46 million in 2023.
Adding up these amounts, Brando earned about $129.4 million in 2023 dollars for making these three films.
Shooting for the film took place in the Philippines. While there, Coppola threatened suicide, broke his Oscars in frustration, remortgaged his estate to pay for the film’s completion, endured Typhoon Olga wrecking the film’s sets and the heart attack of lead actor Martin Sheen (that nearly led to the abandonment of the film after Sheen had replaced original star, Harvey Keitel).
Luckily for him, Sheen recovered, the film was a big hit and is now regarded as one of the best war films ever made. The film won two Academy Awards for cinematography and sound but lost the Best Picture award to Kramer vs. Kramer.
Like Orson Welles, another great film director, Stanley Kubrick was not prolific in his career, making less than a dozen feature films and a few documentaries. Kubrick’s movie projects were always meticulously chosen. (His secretary remembers jumping whenever Kubrick rejected novels as movie projects by hurling them at his office wall one after another.)
Whether he was aware of it or not, Stanley Kubrick did seem to have a preoccupation with violence and its origins. The obvious starting point are the ape-men sequences at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where we seem to witness one of the first murders in history. Kubrick’s 1951 documentary, The Big Fight, is about a boxing match. Then we come to depictions of violent crime in The Killing (1956) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). There is also the sexual violence of the rape scenes in A Clockwork Orange and what would today be called paedophilia and toxic masculinity in Lolita (1962). The violence of war in Paths of Glory (!957), Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964), Barry Lyndon (1975), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). And the violence of relationships in The Shining (1980) (physical, psychological and emotional) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (emotional). Even HAL, the spaceship’s computer in 2001, has homicidal tendencies.
Kubrick was also interested in exploring how violence affects the mind. We see that more in his later films like A Clockwork Orange, where we almost feel sympathy for the amoral thug Alex when he gets mentally and physically tortured by the future state he lives in to recondition him to be “normal.” “I was cured all right!” Alex quips sarcastically at the end of it all.
Then there is the descent into madness of Jack Torrance in The Shining and Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. When all three characters are at their most evil, they do the infamous Kubrick Gaze or Stare.
Press play above.
I also have a theory that Kubrick was doing his versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Spartacus being his Henry V (featuring the star and director of the 1944 Henry V movie, Laurence Olivier), A Clockwork Orange his Richard III, and The Shining his Macbeth. You could also argue that Eyes Wide Shut and its themes of marital jealousy and perceived female infidelity echo Othello and The Winter’s Tale. (Let’s not forget that Shakespeare was another artist interested in exploring violence as evidenced in the bloodbath of Titus Andronicus and the putting out of the old man Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear: “Out, vile jelly!”) It’s such a pity we never got to see an actual Kubrick adaptation of Shakespeare. What would have resulted from this meeting of great minds? We’ll never know, and it probably wouldn’t have interested Kubrick to go over such well-trodden ground as The Bard’s plays.
In another similarity with Orson Welles, he and Kubrick died at 70. By being spartan in their output, they never gave us a chance to get bored with them. They always left us wanting more (in the grand showbiz tradition). I think of them smoking cigars and watching and critiquing films together in the Great Movie Theatre in the sky.
There is a moment in John Carpenter’s “The Fog” (1980) when the character of Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) reveals the film’s theme. Yes, themes in horror movies are rarities. Most of them are wall-to-wall ketchup. The Irish surname Malone and his collar seem to label both him and his grandfather as Catholic priests, and they have vows of chastity to follow, which makes the finding of his grandfather’s diary odd. The Malone bloodline should have ended with his grandfather. Did the screenwriters forget this? Catholic priests can have illegitimate children, but it would be unusual. Father Malone says that he must pay for the orchestrated murders that his grandfather and the other conspirators in the sleepy seaside town of Antonio Bay perpetrated against wealthy leader Blake and his leper companions on their clipper ship in 1880.
The theme is inherited guilt and, in particular, how the treatment of Native Americans and the slave trade still trouble the American psyche. But are we guilty of what our ancestors did? Do we carry a moral stain within us because of their actions? It’s something Jews have dealt with for two thousand years over the crucifixion of Jesus. In Mel Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” the controversial line from the Gospel of Matthew was included where the Jewish High Priest Caiaphas says that Christ’s blood is “on us, and on our children.” A powerful and damning line written by a Christian set the stage for the persecution Jews suffered from then on, leading to the Holocaust. That’s another case of inherited guilt that Germans are dealing with to this day. Then there is the slave trade. A black person once told me that because I am white, I bear some responsibility for slavery. I pointed out that everyone involved in the slave trade is long gone, and whatever crimes they committed during their lifetime died with them. But, no, this person wouldn’t accept that and wanted to keep the righteous indignation going, ignoring the fact that I’m genetically 100% Irish and that Ireland played no part in the slave trade. None. White people are not all the same, and things are not as simple as they seem on the surface. The statement revealed more about the person speaking it and their attitude to whites instead of the unfair and untrue condemnation of me that they intended it to be. It’s so much easier to blame others for our problems than to accept personal responsibility for our own lives.
John Carpenter said he got the idea for The Fog while visiting Stonehenge in England with his then-girlfriend, the late Debra Hill. They saw a fog that appeared to glow and pulsate. She asked Carpenter what he thought was in that fog. “Ghosts,” he replied. (Hill and Carpenter would go on to write the screenplay for “The Fog.”)
In the plays of William Shakespeare, ghosts usually only appear after a murder occurs. The restless spirit either wants to inform an innocent party of what has happened to them (e.g., Hamlet’s father) or to drive the perpetrators mad with guilt and terror (the banquet scene in “Macbeth”). In “The Fog,” the ghosts of Blake and his men do both. By dropping a huge brick from the church walls on Father Malone’s desk during the witching hour sequence at the start, the spirits inform him of a dark family secret of which he was previously unaware. With his pious values shaken to their core after the diary’s discovery in the walls, Malone becomes slightly unhinged, withdrawing into an alcoholic stupor for the rest of the picture before his fate gets sealed in the film’s coda. (Uncorking a bottle of wine is the first thing we see Father Malone do in the movie before any revelations happen. He even tries to tempt Bennett, the caretaker, a young John Carpenter in a rare acting role, into joining him in a nightcap, but Bennett declines the priest’s offer of a drink. Later, Father Malone’s continual alcohol dependence as a coping mechanism suggests he has a drinking problem. You could argue that The Fog and the Carpenter-produced Halloween III both suffer from the portrayals of Irish-Americans as drunks, an unwelcome, stereotypical trope.)
Hamlet sees his father’s ghost on the battlements of Elsinore castle in a scene from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
“The Fog” seems to put a supernatural twist to the plot of Hitchcock’s “Jamaica Inn.” In “The Fog,” the original Father Malone and his co-conspirators set false fires on the shore to make the leper colony ship crash on the rocks, killing everyone on board and leaving Blake’s gold open for plundering. Hitchcock’s “Jamaica Inn” (1939) is an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel about a smuggling gang luring ships to their doom on the coast of Cornwall in England. (Hitchcock would also adapt du Maurier’s “Rebecca” and “The Birds.” Interestingly, Bodega Bay, California was the shooting location for “The Birds” and “The Fog”) Janet Leigh from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” even makes an appearance in “The Fog” on the 20th anniversary of her infamous shower scene.
Clint Eastwood as Dave Garber in his directorial-debut, the stalker-prototype movie “Play Misty For Me.”
Carpenter then seemed to take inspiration from two Clint Eastwood movies (Carpenter is a big Clint fan, hence Kurt Russell coming across as The Man With No Name’s kid brother in “Escape from New York” (1981) and “Escape from L.A.” (1996)). He took the “karmic-ghost-returning-from-the-grave-to-punish-a-community-for-their-moral-weakness-and-complicity-in-his-death” trope from Eastwood’s “High Plains Drifter.” (Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare On Elm Street” also used that plot device.) Then Carpenter made the DJ-in-peril storyline from Clint’s “Play Misty For Me” the subplot for the character of Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau, Carpenter’s then-wife) who serves as a kind of narrator and moral centre of “The Fog” in her coastal lighthouse radio station.
Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) notices the unearthly fog for the first time. Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal
The first cut of “The Fog” didn’t test well with audiences, and Carpenter decided to bring everyone back for reshoots, which seemed to go down better with the public. Critics never seemed to like “The Fog”, some of them questioning the scene where a corpse with no eyes gets up from a mortuary slab and walks across the room towards Jamie Lee Curtis only to collapse before it reaches her. They thought it was pointless and that the characters acted like idiots (we won’t even mention a hitchhiking Jamie Lee Curtis letting herself get picked up by a random male and sleeping with him immediately before even telling him her name!)
Tom Atkins is solid as always in the lead role of Nick Castle, and Carpenter and his superb cinematographer Dean Cundey make the low-budget effects look way better than they could have ended up. (Indeed Atkins, Cundey, and Stonehenge itself would make another appearance in the Carpenter-produced “Halloween III: Season of the Witch.”)
The Fog remake (Ugh!)
Despite its flaws, “The Fog” worked on the level of a chilling short story that stays with you. Compared to the 2005 remake, which was beyond awful, the original now looks like a masterpiece.
Blade Runner (1982), set in November 2019, came of age this week. In the closing moments of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, Rutger Hauer, in a soliloquy he wrote, uses the last moments in the life of replicant Roy Batty to compare life memories to drops of water: “All these moments will be lost like tears in rain.”
In the week a classic time-travelling franchise returns to cinemas with “Terminator: Dark Fate,” let’s delve deeper into this common science fiction trope.
Time is similar to a body of water with its own ecosystem composed of elements that are not interchangeable or what I call a “Chronosphere”. I define Chronosphere as “an infinite time superhighway containing chronological and coexisting past, present and future timelines and the wormholes within and around them where the theoretical possibility of time travel can occur.”
The elements of an ecosystem are in delicate balance with each other, and tinkering with any of it, like reducing the number of bees or trees, can have a devastating knock-on effect on all life on our planet. Similar to wading into a body of water, entering time’s Chronosphere is where humans frequently could find themselves out of their depth.
The three stages of time are:
1. The Past – concerned with mistakes and regrets and reliving past glories or the past glories of others.
2. The Present – concerning reality or our conception of it.
3. The Future – encapsulating all our hopes and fears of the unknown.
I propose a possible fourth stage – Alt-Time, an overarching concept that can involve all three stages of time and any possible combinations of the triumvirate or in the isolation of future time.
If I may take the aquatic analogy further, time also possesses a density that counteracts attempts to instigate propulsion through it. Wormholes are the water spouts of the time-space continuum, but unlike water spouts, they are theoretical portals to other dimensions.
If you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, you get Pi or 3.14. If you don’t get that calculation, you don’t have a circle. Time itself is circular: a clock face, the circle of life, the great wheel of Time, or a wormhole itself. Even the symbol of infinity is a snake swallowing its tail.
Visionary sci-fi author H.G. Wells first proposed time travel in his 1895 novel “The Time Machine.” “The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time,” according to Wikipedia.
As with any invention created by humans, we never see all the consequences of our actions. We see some of them, and that is where my quote about human knowledge can come in.
Again, another water analogy, just as the level of our knowledge is only at the surface, so we cannot see all the ripples emanating outwards from discoveries or of time travel.
If the future has not occurred yet, then how could you time travel there with no coordinates? To travel forward in time, it would appear to be necessary for the future to be coexisting with the past and the present and happening simultaneously. How can it be preexisting when it has not happened yet?
Let us introduce a hypothesis.
Stafford’s Hypothesis on The Transference of Existence
Even if you self-isolated, stood still, and held your breath after traveling into the past, you would still be a pebble diverting the flow of time in some way. The very transference of existence via wormholes, not interaction with past actors or events, creates paradoxes.
Time Transference has three stages:
1. The distance traversed between the origin or starting point of the wormhole and the rip in the Chronosphere (Space-Time continuum).
2. The transference of biological material through the rip in the Chronosphere without damage to or mutation of the genetic code of the chrono-commuter.
3. Arrival at the endpoint of the time transference – the reconstruction of the chrono-commuter’s genetic material and the sealing of the rip in the Chronosphere.
Some people believe time travel to be an impossibility. Others think it has already happened. Remember that American Civil War-era photo of Nicolas Cage that went viral a few years back?
Fortunately, time travel does not exist. With it, the human race would try to solve past mistakes in isolation, erase any knowledge gleaned from making them, and create a chain reaction of unforeseen consequences. These could destroy the past, along with the present and future simultaneously. Time itself could become the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.
If/when time travel ever happens, no doubt Richard Branson will corner the market and get in there first. If you’ll excuse me, I must go, I have a time travel blog to write. (Or do I?)
Sir Alfred Hitchcock Meets Mary Shelley’s Creation
In 1964, the great movie director Alfred Hitchcock, The Master of Suspense, was interviewed by Huw Weldon of the BBC. Hitch was asked if he had “ever been tempted to make what is nowadays called a horror film.”
“Are you talking about visual horror like “Frankenstein” and that kind of thing?” Hitch asked, seeking clarification.
Weldon confirmed that was what he meant.
“No, they’re… they’re props. I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience and not necessarily on the screen.”
Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in “Psycho”
Hitch took the example of his own movie”Psycho.” “Now, this film had a horrible scene at the beginning with a girl being murdered in a shower. Well, I deliberately made that pretty rough, but as the film developed, I put less and less physical horror into it because I was leaving that in the mind of the audience and, as the film went on, there was less and less violence but the tension, in the mind of the viewer, was increased considerably. I was transferring it from the film into their minds. So, towards the end, I had no violence at all. But the audience by this time was screaming in agony.”
Breakdown of the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock’s “Psycho”
“One’s challenged by the audience. They’re saying to me “show us” and “I know what’s coming next”… and I say, “do you?” And therefore, that’s the avoidance of the cliché — automatically. They’re expecting a cliché and I have to say “we cannot have a cliché here”
So there was a clear differntial in Hitchcock’s mind between “visual horror” like “Frankenstein” and psychological horror like “Psycho” (yes, the dessicated corpse of Mrs Bates is clearly a prop too but only revealed in the last scene and not the basis for most of the horror that preceeded it.) Hitchcock meant that real horror is what you DON’T see, the theatre of the mind, if you will.
Mrs Bates: “Mother’s not feeling herself today.”
Horror works particularly well on radio, the original “theatre of the mind.” The listeners are given prompts by the narrator but have to construct the visuals in their mind. Audiobooks and podcasts would be the modern equivalent. My vampire short story “Nightfall” will be available in audiobook form in August and I’m very much looking forward to hearing the results.
Let’s take a look at a classic horror movie and its remake – “The Haunting” from 1963 and the Spielberg-backed remake in 1999. The original, directed by Robert Wise, got tremendous scares from the use of sound and suggestion. The remake was an orgy of CGI effects. Most people look on the original as a classic horror movie, few hold the remake in high regard. Why? The remake shows us too much too often. The original keeps its cards close to its chest and the result is the same story told in a much scarier way.
“The Exorcist” is regarded by many as the most frightening movie of all-time. It is a film where the Demon Pazuzu, the ultimate evil, possesses the body of a young girl, the ultimate symbol of innocence, and speaks and acts through her. You never see the demon itself, there is no easy resolution for the audience of bringing the creature out into the light before it is destroyed as in 1950s monster movies. There isn’t that closure. (My mother was so freaked out seeing “The Exorcist” in the cinema that she claimed she saw a red devil with the horns and the tail and everything. It appears to have been some stress-induced temporary psychosis or something.) There is only the theme of the transference of evil, a constant in the work of its director William Friedkin.
“Exorcist” director William Friedkin
Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” benefitted greatly from the malfunctioning prop shark they had. It meant the director couldn’t show the shark early as he had planned to and had to be creative to hint at its presence (the excellent score by John Williams helped.) The result? A freaked-out audience made hyper-aware of the subconscious level of the ocean’s surface and the potential unseen horror lurking beneath it.
26-year-old Steven Spielberg in Bruce the Shark’s mouth
Fear of the unknown is the key to great horror. We don’t need to know that Dracula is seeking his long-lost love across the centuries. He’s an ancient predator at your window seeking your blood. That’s all that’s necessary to impart to an audience. We don’t need to know that Michael Myers in Halloween had a terrible home life that made him the unstoppable killer we know and fear. He’s an immortal bogeyman and he’s coming after you. Don’t give away your character’s mystique cheaply.
Horror is best when drip-fed in a subtle way and not in a deluge of computer effects dumped on the viewing public.
No matter how convincing CGI is, an audience inherently knows it’s not real and that they’re watching a gimmick. Maybe Hollywood will learn this lesson and we can have a new golden age of psychological horror.
On June 3rd, 1986, “A Kind Of Magic”, the twelfth studio album from Queen was released. The European Magic Tour supporting the album began four days later at the Rasunda Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden.
A cartoon figure from the “A Kind of Magic” cover inflates on The Magic Tour
It was the first Queen album I’d purchased as a Queen fan, the others being purchased after Live Aid and after this album (by early ’87, I had all Queen’s albums on vinyl and still do.)
With Queen contributing many songs from this album to epic fantasy film Highlander, there was a sort of return to thematic elements of Queen’s early albums minus the quirky, Tolkienesque lyrics about ogres, titans and fairy fellers. This was Queen doing a concept album 80s-style with syths and Highlander’s immortality theme playing into the tragic reality about to engulf Freddie and the band.
Highlander star Christopher Lambert explains how Queen’s involvement grew:
“Highlander coming out was a very exciting time for me. What was also very interesting is that Queen were meant to do only one track – it was the opening credits, ‘Princes Of The Universe’, that was the deal. So they sat down for a private screening for them in a movie theatre and Freddie Mercury when he came out, he said all excited: “I’m doing the whole fucking album! This movie is too fucking great!”. They went and wrote the songs in four weeks and went into the studio and it was one of the biggest selling albums of their career. So you know it’s strange, it’s like nobody ever thought that Highlander was gonna be, thirty years later, still a cult movie, music included. About Freddie… there are many good singers, but to be really great it’s not enough just to sing correctly. You have to do it with the heart and he is the best at it.”
Although it was hard to imagine during Queen’s post-Live Aid second wind, “A Kind of Magic” would be the end of an era for them in many ways. It would be the final album before Freddie’s HIV diagnosis in April 1987 (“Innuendo” would be recorded under time constraints and Freddie’s increasing availability issues due to illness). The Magic Tour would be Freddie’s last with the band.
Queen with producer Reinhold Mack
It was also the last time they worked with German producer Reinhold Mack. Mack first worked with Queen on “The Game” album in 1979 at Musicland Studios in Munich. He had produced some of Queen’s biggest hits including “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, “Another One Bites The Dust”, “Under Pressure”, “Radio Ga Ga”, “I Want To Break Free” and “One Vision.” Brian May said that Mack had been “quite a find” for the band. He was responsible for a different, stripped-back Queen sound, the antithesis of the elaborate, complex sound of previous Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker. With Baker, Queen played every track in the studio until the take was perfect. Mack said they didn’t have to do that and that he could drop in snippets of different takes. This surprised the band and saved them a lot of time. Mack even persuaded Brian to drop his Red Special and play a Fender Stratocaster belonging to Roger on “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”
The great Mr Mack today
“A Kind of Magic” would also be the last time Queen would do several songs for a movie (here’s hoping the James Bond producers giver Queen + Adam Lambert a shot at the next theme tune).
Larking about shooting the “One Vision” video
“A Kind of Magic” is a very listenable album. I can listen to it all the way through unlike some of the late seventies albums which were a smattering of big hits and filler. As with Queen’s concerts on The Magic Tour, the album kicks off with the extended version of “One Vision” which teases out the intro superbly until Freddie’s ethereal vocal cry echoes across the synths just before Brian’s euphoric riff kicks in. “A Kind of Magic” the single follows.
A John Deacon song “One Year of Love is next and it’s the kind of classy, smoky ballad that Sade did so well at the time (saxophone courtesy of the guy who played on “Careless Whisper.”) “Pain Is So Close To Pleasure” is a rare sojourn into Motown stylings for Freddie Mercury (“Cool Cat” on “Hot Space” and B-side “Soul Brother” would probably be the closest tracks to this).
“Friends Will Be Friends” ends side one. Even though it’s a self-conscious attempt to repeat “We Are The Champions” and didn’t make the UK top ten, I still like it as a song.
Who wants to live forever? photo shoot
Brian’s “Who Wants To Live Forever” starts side two and, from here on in, it’s all songs from the Highlander soundtrack. Seal and Ronan Keating said this song made them cry the first time they heard it and it is a very beautiful song with lush orchestral accompaniment. It worked well live on The Magic Tour too, although it was still “a new song” as Freddie said and hadn’t found its place among their other hits with the audience yet.
Brian Blessed’s Vulcan says “who wants to live forever?” in the battle scene near the end of “Flash Gordon,” Queen’s last big fantasy soundtrack outing. It’s possible Brian unconsciously remembered that line from the previous film but it’s a perfect iteration of Highlander’s themes.
Brian May playing a flying V guitar – a Washburn RR-V
Brian’s rip-snorting “Gimme The Prize” erupts with a cascading Brian May solo, it reaches a crescendo and a sound clip from the film Highlander kicks in (a news reporter comments on one of the many decapitated bodies in the film: “A head, which at this time, has no name.” Clancy Brown’s Kurgen responds with “I KNOW HIS NAME!”). “Here I am!” Freddie declares, “I’m the master of your destiny” (one reviewer at the time compared him to Alice Cooper on this).
Roger’s unsurprisingly drum-heavy “Don’t Lose Your Head” pounds in. It began life as the B-side to the single “A Kind of Magic” under the working title “A Dozen Red Roses For My Darling.” Some thought this was filler (black singer Joan Armatrading pops up to say “Don’t Lose Your Head” over and over for no apparent reason, maybe an attempt by the band to counter negative publicity over their Sun City shows in Apartheid-era South Africa around that time.) It does get a little repetitive but I don’t hate it.
Queen with Christopher Lambert at the video shoot for “Princes of the Universe”
Then we come to the final track on the album – “Princes of the Universe.” It’s Freddie’s only solo writing credit on the album (almost hard to believe considering he wrote most of Queen’s early albums single-handedly). The title is outrageously camp but the song builds up an incredible head of steam. With Princes, “One Vision” and “Gimme The Prize”, “A Kind of Magic” is probably the closest version to a heavy metal version of Queen we ever got. The single of “Princes of the Universe” was released in America and the video featured Highlander star Christopher Lambert crossing swords and sawn-off microphone stand with Freddie.
The Highander Vs The Messenger of The Gods
It would be three years before the next Queen album was released, the longest gap there had ever been between albums up to that point. There followed a frenzied period of activity to get new Queen material out before Freddie’s inevitable demise. So “A Kind of Magic” is a demarcation point between what went before and the beginning of the end of Queen Mach 1 (two more would follow with Paul Rodgers and now with Adam Lambert.)
Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is a continuation of the monstrous themes Del Toro has pursued in his previous films like Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, Cronos, Blade II and both Hellboy movies. The story concerns a mute cleaning woman (Sally Hawkins) who works at a secret US government facility where she meets and develops feelings for an aquatic creature that has been captured in South America and brought there for research.
It’s another Beauty and the Beast tale in the style of The Phantom of the Opera, King Kong and The Hunchback of Notre Dame that Hollywood is so fond of.
If there is one central, recurring theme in American movies, I believe it is this: individual righteousness is more important than the group ethic. “The Shape of Water” is set before America has put a man on the moon. It is mentioned that the structure of the creature’s lungs could be used as a model for a prototype breathing system for an astronaut in space. They try to x-ray the creature, but its density prevents anything being seen. So, it’s proposed to end its life and perform an autopsy to study it properly. Now if she was following the group ethic, she would say that the creature must die for the common good, but she chooses not to do that. Her individual righteousness supersedes the group ethic and she decides to rescue him from certain death. You see this theme in everything from “Serpico” to the Jason Bourne movies and “Dances with Wolves” to “Avatar.” Is it any wonder that whistleblowing is so widespread when the whisteblowers themselves are consciously or subconsciously absorbing this theme from the time they watch their first American movie?
“The Shape of Water” is only the second fantasy film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, the other being “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” If you’re doing fantasy correctly, you can have all the fantastical surface elements but get in some subtle social commentary underneath and this movie does it beautifully.
The heroes are all minority underdogs; the creature is being tortured and experimented on because of the way he was born, the heroine is has a disability and can’t speak, she’s friends with a black woman and there’s a scene showing the civil rights struggle on an old black and white TV, the heroine is also friends with a gay man and he is going through his own struggles. It even plays into the whole #MeToo thing with a scene of sexual harassment. The film is set in the 1960s, but it is made for an audience of today and cleverly comments on issues of equality and diversity that we’re still struggling with now.
Guillermo del Toro won the Best Director Oscar at the 2018 Academy Awards, but his victory was clouded in controversy after claims that “The Shape of Water” was plagiarised from another work.
The backlash first began on social media with some people tweeting about glaring similarities between “The Shape of Water” and a 1969 one-act play titled “Let Me Hear You Whisper” by the late Paul Zindel. Then the comparisons really began and it was alleged that there were 61 similarities between the play and the film. Paul Zindel’s family became aware of the allegations and filed a lawsuit. “We are shocked that a major studio could make a film so obviously derived from my late father’s work without anyone recognizing it and coming to us for the rights,” David Zindel, the author’s son said.
Del Toro has denied all claims of plagiarism directed towards his film, but the film did lose out at the Writer’s Guild Awards and didn’t get the Oscar for Best Screenplay, probably due to the negative publicity.
“I have been at this 25 years and have an unimpeachable reputation,” the director said in his defence.
Universal Studios own the rights to “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and they’ve recently tried to reboot their horror characters (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Invisible Man) in something called The Dark Universe. Their stated goal was to make their remakes as big as Marvel is, unfortunately there’s no great demand for these old characters at the box office. The first film in the Dark Universe, “The Mummy” with Tom Cruise, flopped badly and it looks like the other planned films have been shelved for now. Del Toro actually pitched “The Shape of Water” to Universal as a remake of “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” They were initially interested until Del Toro said that the girl was mute and Universal thought it was a crazy idea and passed. So Del Toro took his idea to Fox Searchlight, had a huge, Oscar-winning and the rest is history. Universal must have been kicking themselves that they passed on it. The rest is history while the while lawsuits rumble on.
The Business Dictionary defines self-interest as a “focus on actions or activities that are advantageous to an individual or organization. For a business or individual to survive and grow, a degree of self-interest is necessary. When there is too much focus on self-interest the benefits of the group at large diminishes.”
Adam Smith
The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) wrote two books “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759) and “The Wealth of Nations” (1776) (considered “the bible of capitalism”). He proposed a theory that capitalism was essentially fuelled by the self-interest of people: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
John Forbes Nash Jr.
John Forbes Nash Jr. was an American mathematician whose life story was told in Ron Howard’s 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell Crowe. Nash updated Smith’s theory with some of his own ideas. He reasoned that the individual could get what they wanted yet still benefit the group they belonged to. This film clip of Nash and his classmates in a bar neatly explains Nash’s theory.
Nash won the Nobel Prize in 1994 in Mathematics for his equilibrium theory. John Moriarty of Manchester University describes the theory as “the ability to analyse situations of conflict and co-operation and produce predictions about how people will behave.” He goes on to say that Nash’s equilibrium is “perhaps the most important idea in economic analysis.” So why hasn’t Nash’s equilibrium been adopted more by the mainstream?
Firstly, you can’t quantify human nature. It is not fixed but fluid and unpredictable. It’s not like Cambridge Mathematician Alan Turing’s “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” where he could explain the markings and patterns on animals with an equation. That was rooted in genetics and evolution is a mighty slow thing. Human nature is extremely fast, just look how it changes day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute on the internet. It can be contradictory and even illogical at times. Applying logic to potentially illogical behaviour is to construct a house on shifting foundations. The structure will inevitably collapse. That’s the first problematic element of Nash’s theory but I propose an even bigger flaw that’s prevented it from being embraced in a wider context.
The human condition is one variable but a bigger one is the group itself. In the film clip with the blonde, Nash’s theory might work when he’s with a group of friends. They presumably know and trust each other and should therefore support one another for the common good. Again, it should work for a family, they too should presumably know and trust each other and have common goals (but human beings are complex creatures and there is no guarantee that the family isn’t dysfunctional and operating in a counter-productive way.) Assuming that these smaller groups want to progress along the same path together, we can expand the theory outwards to a community of people. Here the theory begins to fall apart. A community of people might not know or trust one another or have common goals. That possibility lessens even further when you expand the theory to a city or a country or a conflict between two countries. So the more you expand Nash’s theory outwards, the less chance it has of succeeding.
Nash with his wife Alicia at the Oscars
Nash was also schizophrenic: “I was disturbed in this way for a very long period of time, like 25 years.” It affected his marriage and he and his wife Alicia divorced in 1962. His condition improved in the 80s and they remarried in 2001. Sadly the couple were killed in May 2015 when the taxi they were passengers in crashed in New Jersey. A sad loss of a great man. Life is not predictable.
The theme is inherited guilt and, in particular, how the treatment of Native Americans and the slave trade still trouble the American psyche. But are we guilty of what our ancestors did? Do we carry a moral stain within us because of their actions? It’s something Jews have dealt with for two thousand years over the crucifixion of Jesus. In Mel Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” the controversial line from the Gospel of Matthew was included where the Jewish High Priest Caiaphas says that Christ’s blood is “on us, and on our children.” A powerful and damning line written by a Christian set the stage for the persecution Jews suffered from then on, leading to the Holocaust. That’s another case of inherited guilt that Germans are dealing with to this day. Then there is the slave trade. A black person once told me that because I am white, I bear some responsibility for slavery. I pointed out that everyone involved in the slave trade is long gone, and whatever crimes they committed during their lifetime died with them. But, no, this person wouldn’t accept that and wanted to keep the righteous indignation going, ignoring the fact that I’m genetically 100% Irish and that Ireland played no part in the slave trade. None. White people are not all the same, and things are not as simple as they seem on the surface. The statement revealed more about the person speaking it and their attitude to whites instead of the unfair and untrue condemnation of me that they intended it to be. It’s so much easier to blame others for our problems than to accept personal responsibility for our own lives.
In the plays of William Shakespeare, ghosts usually only appear after a murder occurs. The restless spirit either wants to inform an innocent party of what has happened to them (e.g., Hamlet’s father) or to drive the perpetrators mad with guilt and terror (the banquet scene in “Macbeth”). In “The Fog,” the ghosts of Blake and his men do both. By dropping a huge brick from the church walls on Father Malone’s desk during the witching hour sequence at the start, the spirits inform him of a dark family secret of which he was previously unaware. With his pious values shaken to their core after the diary’s discovery in the walls, Malone becomes slightly unhinged, withdrawing into an alcoholic stupor for the rest of the picture before his fate gets sealed in the film’s coda. (Uncorking a bottle of wine is the first thing we see Father Malone do in the movie before any revelations happen. He even tries to tempt Bennett, the caretaker, a young John Carpenter in a rare acting role, into joining him in a nightcap, but Bennett declines the priest’s offer of a drink. Later, Father Malone’s continual alcohol dependence as a coping mechanism suggests he has a drinking problem. You could argue that The Fog and the Carpenter-produced Halloween III both suffer from the portrayals of Irish-Americans as drunks, an unwelcome, stereotypical trope.)
Firstly, you can’t quantify human nature. It is not fixed but fluid and unpredictable. It’s not like Cambridge Mathematician Alan Turing’s “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” where he could explain the markings and patterns on animals with an equation. That was rooted in genetics and evolution is a mighty slow thing. Human nature is extremely fast, just look how it changes day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute on the internet. It can be contradictory and even illogical at times. Applying logic to potentially illogical behaviour is to construct a house on shifting foundations. The structure will inevitably collapse. That’s the first problematic element of Nash’s theory but I propose an even bigger flaw that’s prevented it from being embraced in a wider context.
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