Witches and Women in Genre - Week Five

When someone mentions witches, we tend to think of old, ugly, crone-like women with warts on their noses and, perhaps, a high pitched voice that just instills fear into every heart that's near enough to hear (lookin' at you, Wicked Witch of the West). They're the stereotypical witches of fiction, movies, and folk tales, which makes sense because, way back when, stories about witches were meant to teach children lessons about not wandering too far from home or obeying their parents lest there be consequences. In those stories, witches had to be old, ugly, and evil.

That does not necessarily feel like the case for the witches in Diana Wynne Jones' Aunt Maria (pronounced ma-RYE-uh). At least right off the bat. We enter this world with news that the main character Midge's father has recently passed and their relative (by marriage only) may need some help in her daily tasks as she is quite old and might be unable to care for herself properly. Midge, her mother, and her older brother, Chris spend the rest of their Easter holiday in Cranbury, a quiet, seemingly deserted town by the sea.

It's interesting to read about the witches in this book, because they don't embody the witch stereotype at all. They don't fly on brooms, or practice potions, have black cats (Aunt Maria seems to really hate animals of all sorts -- mostly because she knows those animals were created by her out of other people) and they certainly don't wear extravagant gowns or robes. They're more of a mystery as we really only get to see them through Midge's eyes, and way after the fact when Midge writes down everything she can remember that day. They have power, yet they rarely use it and seem to bow down to Aunt Maria, who Midge at one point secretly dubs the Queen of Cranbury.

I think the witches in this novel conform more to an archetype of witch than a stereotype. In Aunt Maira the witch's power comes from the spoken work (eg: they could carry on a conversation with someone and their magic would be warping that person without them knowing). The Stereotypical witch would use a wand or some incantation. The women are also just... normal looking women. They are the types of old ladies we'd see walking down the street. They're not particularly ugly, or impossibly beautiful, they're fairly normal. Not to mention they use wheelchairs to get around rather than broomsticks. It's an interesting take on the witch that Diana Wynne Jones does and I think she does it absolutely well.

A little more comfortable than riding a broom for hours?

There is a definite "battle of the sexes" going on in this book and it seems that the women have been "winning" for at least twenty years. All of the men seem to be zombies (not in the undead sense) and the ones that can think clearly and articulate their feelings, constantly express disgust for the women of Cranbury and especially Aunt Maria. While these feelings if discontent are understanding, some of the men say offhand comments to Midge (like "this is men's work") when she's the only one who seems to be trying to help them.

I suppose we could look at this as our culture fearing women in power. Aunt Maria seems to have a lot of patience when it comes to people who annoy her (she often ignores them or sends them away to do menial tasks) but when they finally hit the last straw, bad things tend to happen. The men of the town hate Aunt Maria, yet they're afraid of her, fearing that they are "too weak" to do anything about it because their leader disappeared and without him, the men view themselves as useless.

The best part of the book is that Midge is the one who does all the work and help to bring peace back to Cranbury. She helps take down Aunt Maria because of the horrible things she's done to the people she loves, and the other people of the town and believes that there is a better way to co-exist rather than keeping everybody under her thumb. Once Chris gets turned into a wolf and her mother brainwashed into believing that they've left Chris in London, Midge really steps up to right all the wrongs that have been done to her family. 

The Weird - Week Four

Weird is a word we typically use to describe when something is out of the ordinary/it's something we've never seen/when it makes us feel uncomfortable, etc. I like that the term "weird" can cover all sorts of bases with just a single utterance. The "weird" is something people are drawn to for their own reasons, which vary greatly from person to person.

For this week I read Feed. It's one of my favorite books of the past few years and I wanted a chance to re-read it so I did. Feed takes place twenty years after the Rising, a time when an (un)deadly virus swept the nation and eventually the world, infecting every single person on the planet that, at any moment, could cause people to become zombies. The virus, originally meant to cure every disease and illness from cancer to the common cold, turned hostile and effectively unstoppable.

What's weird about Feed isn't that the world tries to get back to absolute normal while coexisting with the zombie hoards that live on the outskirts of their safe zones. It's that the hardly focuses on the zombies at all. The threat of spontaneous amplification (turning into a zombie) as well as the zombies that already exists are constantly mentioned and touched on throughout the novel, but more than that, Feed is about a brother/sister journalism team uncovering a global conspiracy done by the very forces that were put in place to keep the world safe.

I really really enjoyed everything about Feed and I'd recommend it anybody (which I have, on several occasions). The thought that a political scandal/conspiracy could still thrive and fester when there are zombies looming on the horizon just blows my mind. It's weird to think that a political/mystery/monster/horror novel could exist but it does, and it's done beautifully. I came for the zombies, I stayed for the unveiling of a scandal... With zombies.

The Cabin in the Woods was weird in the beginning and only really got weird for me at the very end. The opening begins with two scientists walking through a secret facility (assumably underground - because what's movie science without and underground facility?) discussing trivial things like having children and how strange their girlfriends are. It all seems pretty normal and nonsensical and then the title hits us in the face like a pet trying to wake you up in the morning:

Wow, okay, Cabin in the Woods, we see you.

I'm not going to spend too much time talking about how strange this movie was, because it was very weird. Besides the beginning, we're treated to what feels like a normal horror film (the group is stranded in an unknown place, there is a strange backwater character blatantly foreshadowing all the dangers the group is going to face and who they, of course, dismiss, and there was a sex scene where there probably shouldn't have been a sex scene).

But that's where all the normal things ended. In this film, we find out that weed ultimately saves the day, and the "fool" character is the only one able to do anything about the monster that attack them. There was all sorts of technology present that I'm sure we don't have (or maybe I'm just in the dark about these huge forcefields just chilling out in the middle of the woods somewhere which could be a definite possibility).

I think we enjoy watching/reading/absorbing weird media because it shocks us, it takes us out of our comfort zone. We are allowed to live in the "what if" moment for a while. What if the zombie apocalypse happened and the human race continued and adapted to it? What if giant monsters were real and we treated hunting them like we treat hunting deer or fishing? What if we had to routinely sacrifice five people to keep the "ancient ones" from destroying the world? It's compelling to us because we're able to imagine a world where real life doesn't necessarily have to apply.

Ground floor: death and early retirement

PS: Shout out to John Dies at the End for making the "Weird Movies and Recent Horror List". The film is excellent, the book is a wild ride of fantastic 'what the fuck'

J-Horror - Week Three

I think people tend to assume that J-Horror is much scarier than Western horror. In some instances they might be right (like how Ju-On is scarier than The Grudge, or Ringu instills fear in greater quantities than the Ring, which tends to be more comical in places). I definitely assumed that the Kwaidan would be scarier than it actually was.

Personally, I expected the stories in Kwaidan to instill fear into my spine, to make me recoil away from the pages. There were times where I thought some of the stories were leading up to that, but then was kind of let down by how... Tame the scare was.

I actually found myself comparing the stories in the Kwaidan to a short horror manga I'd read over the summer and the differences were pretty interesting. Sure, they're not the same medium, once is visual and contemporary while the other is far older and only has the written word to rely on, but I liked how different the mood was in both of them (at least to me. Maybe others found the stories in the Kwaidan more bone chilling than I did?). The Manga is called The Enigma of Amigara Fault by the way, and revolves around the story of a fault in the earth suddenly appearing one day with thousands of human shaped holes carved in the sides. The fault draws hundreds of people to the spot and the crowds grow larger and larger every day, but people are also disappearing (some of them claiming that is a hole that is specifically for them, though they can't explain the feeling). You should give it a read, it's pretty spooky.

Click the picture to go to the Manga

The Kwaidan  was good, don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed reading the stories in it. Each and every one was so varied and different from the last. I was interested to see how the stories evolved over time and just what kinds of subjects they would cover and I wasn't disappointed in that aspect. Ghosts, demons, suicide, people without faces, reincarnation... Wow. It was a lot to take in and while I wasn't able to read the Kwaidan cover to cover, I'd like to go back and finish it sometime in the future.

I had two favorites in the Kwaidan were "The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Mōïchi" and "A Dead Secret". I was genuinely surprised by how the blind bishi player had his ears ripped off and managed to sit there as still as he did. I thought the twist that the was playing for a bunch of ghosts was really nice, and the language of the story felt pretty peaceful, as if there were nothing wrong. We were lulled into a false sense of security.

In "A Dead Secret" we had the typical tale of a woman, O-Sono, who died and came back to haunt her family every night after that. As it usually plays out in horror media, everybody is afraid of her, believing that the only time a ghost comes back from the grave to walk amongst the living, it's with evil intent and surely they must be cures. Really thought, this one had more of a happy ending, with O-Sono just wanting to clean out some of the secrets she'd been harboring for years (love letters from when she was studying in Kyōto) so that her family won't think any less of her.

Western horror rarely has those types of happy endings. The ghost is almost always malignant, cursing any family who dares to live in their house. The spirits may seem to have good intentions to begin with but there is always an ulterior motive just below the surface. When we watch a Western horror, we assume that the ghosts are evil and something bad is going to happen, and we are pretty much always right.


P.S. I watched The Audition with a friend of mine and he pointed out to me that the movie seemed familiar to him and pulled up a music video for one of my favorite bands, so I thought I'd link it here. It's pretty much a shot for shot of scenes from The Audition:

ENJOY!

Interview With a Vampire - Week Two

I think a central theme that almost every piece of vampire literature (that I've read at least) is the idea of immortality and relationships and how they work (or don't work as is much of the case of Interview With a Vampire).

This week was my very first time reading Interview With a Vampire, and I'd actually enjoyed reading it. While there was a pretty noticeable lack of gore and human feeding, as I'd come to expect in my vampire literature, I was pleasantly surprised by how much Anne Rice explored the relationship aspect of immortality. We always hear about Vampires tending to mope around when they reach a certain age, discontent with losing all their friends, watching their loved ones die, and not being able to connect with many other Vampires who are busy with their own bloodlust to care much about forming bonds with anybody else.

"Immortality: what a drag"
Sure, immortality at times can be daunting, but Anne Rice shows us, through the protagonist and narrator of the story, Louis that it's important to make friends when you're going to be around for a long time.
Louis and Lestat (the Vampire who creates Louis out of desperation for a companion) spend a good chunk of the book warring with each other. They constantly argue, bicker, and disagree about many things, such as what/who to eat, how to treat Louis' preexisting servants, and what to do with Louis' money and property. Louis does not trust or even like Lestat but must stay with him because Lestat has conveniently left out certain parts about living as a Vampire that could potentially lead Louis down a path of destruction. I thought the parallel of parasitic Vampires living in a parasitic relationship was killer (pun intended?) and thought it was fleshed out pretty well.

Eventually, of course, Louis finds proper and healthier company in Armand, a centuries old Vampire who's been living in Paris and took to Louis from the very first moment he'd seen him. It was interesting to see Louis actually push Armand away after several years of living together, still poisoned by Lestat's cruelty and crushed by the loss of the only other Vampire who was nice to him (Claudia). I guess the saying 'time heals all wounds' isn't true for even the most eternal of beings.

In the same way, the movies Byzantium explore different types of Vampire relationships that are almost exactly opposite Louis and Lestat's. Eleanor and Clara in Byzantium are mother and daughter and have counted on each other for nearly two hundred years. Clara does everything in her power to keep Eleanor safe, which includes not being completely truthful with her daughter about the people that are hunting them, and have been hunting them for as long as they've been changed. Clara and Lestat have similarities when it comes to the truth. They don't tell it, and it ultimately ends up hurting the one they're keeping in the dark for their protection.

In the end, Eleanor decides to change a boy she'd met, who is dying from Leukemia, and wishes to part ways with Clara, choosing her own path for the first time in her life, which was what I really liked about the movie. The mother/daughter relationship felt real, the audience can see the issue from the eyes of both sides and understand where each character is coming from. The mother only wants whats best for her child, and to keep her child safe and healthy, but might not understand the impact of making every decision without consulting their child first. Even with Vampires, if you love someone you've got to set them free at some point.

I could probably go on about relationship aspects for ages to be completely honest. I really enjoyed both Byzantium and Interview With a Vampire. Their uniqueness is what makes them good media and relationship exploration is what makes them interesting.

I guess if you're going to spend eternity with someone it had better be someone you like.

Frankenstein - Week One

When someone brings up the 'gothic' in todays times, we'd usually jump to thoughts of groups of teenagers dressed all in black, scowling at the world and hiding from the sun, but it's much older and a lot more complex than that. 

In terms of the gothic as it appears in contemporary culture, the first two things that popped into my head were The Woman in Black and Sleepy Hollow.

The Woman in Black centers around a young lawyer from London, Arthur Kipps, who has to go to a small town to arrange a sale of an old estate called the El Marsh house, left when the owner of the house sudden passed. What Arthur doesn't realize is that there is a specter that resides in the house who is the cause of many deaths of children from the nearby town. The Woman in Black, as a whole, is a classic example of the gothic because it covers many of the elements that make up the gothic genre, like the main character, after living in London his whole life, finds himself in an unfamiliar house, that seems far removed from the rest of society. There is a definite air of mystery and suspense in the air as he explores the massive amounts of stuff that the woman who owned the house left behind and the entire film is dominated by a dark and gloomy atmosphere, which sets and keeps the mood for the entirety of the film. 

In a similar vein, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow is a good example of a gothic film, as well as an exaggerated gothic film. Normally, gothic films have a more serious tone to them, as somebody has usually died, or the threat of death looms above the character's heads so there's very little room for comedy or much lightheartedness. Sleepy Hollow manages to keep a fairly gothic atmosphere, through the colors, the isolation and unfamiliarity, as well as the supernatural elements that pervade the storyline, but because it is also Tim Burton, there is underlying humor that comes with the dialogue and actions of the character that show that a movie can still be true to the nature of the gothic genre and yet twist it in new and interesting ways without detracting from the overall theme of the film.