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John Kenneth Muir on The X-Cast
It’s been 23 years since The X-Files debuted and with its resurgence earlier this year, Season 11 is on the way. John Kenneth Muir, author of The X-Files FAQ, sat down with Tony Black of The X-Cast to discuss all things X-Files. For all The X-Files enthusiasts, this interview is for you. Take a listen below.
>>LISTEN<<
The X-Files FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Global Conspiracy, Aliens, Lazarus Species, and Monsters of the Week explores Chris Carter’s popular 1990s science-fiction TV series, which aired on Fox for nine seasons and inspired spin-offs, including feature films, TV shows, toys, novels, and comic books.
It’s amazing story behind how Chris Carter came to write the foreword for the book. In fact, at the time that he wrote it production was in full swing for the six-episode event series that aired on Fox this past January. John explained how that came to be which was from Chris wishing him happy birthday on social media. He then asked Chris for a blog feature and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. What started out as a simple gesture turned into a foreword for a book from no better person.
The book explores the series in terms of its historical context and analyzes how many of the episodes tackle the events of their time: the Clinton era. The X-Files FAQ also tallies the episodes that are based on true stories, selects touchstone moments from the almost decade-long run, and organizes the series by its fantastic subject matter – from serial killers to aliens, from prehistoric menaces to ethnic and religious-based horrors.
Tony started the interview with asking John his ‘fandom’ questions to his discovery of the show to his favorite characters and episodes. The interview continued with an amazing discussion between two fans going in depth about the various episodes and seasons as well as character development.
The X-Files FAQ allows readers to relive the “Mytharc” conspiracy and the unforgettable monsters of the week – from the Fluke Man to the Peacocks.
This is the sort of book I dreamed of writing about the X-FIles. My only regret is that I couldn’t cover every single episode in depth.
-John Kenneth Muir
John Kenneth Muir on After Hours AM!
John Kenneth Muir author of The X-Files FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Global Conspiracy, Aliens, Lazarus Species, and Monsters of the Week, spoke with Joel Sturgis and Eric Olsen about his book and the X-Files TV series! Listen to the podcast below to learn more!
>>LISTEN<<
The X-Files FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Global Conspiracy, Aliens, Lazarus Species, and Monsters of the Week explores Chris Carter’s popular 1990s science-fiction TV series, which aired on Fox for nine seasons and inspired spin-offs, including feature films, TV shows, toys, novels, and comic books. The book explores the series in terms of its historical context and analyzes how many of the episodes tackle the events of their time: the Clinton era. The X-Files FAQ also tallies the episodes that are based on true stories, selects touchstone moments from the almost decade-long run, and organizes the series by its fantastic subject matter – from serial killers to aliens, from prehistoric menaces to ethnic and religious-based horrors.
The X-Files FAQ also features a foreword written by screenwriter Chris Carter who credits John Muir for his impressive and thoughtful musings. In the book you’ll read that the writing on the show, X-Files, was only half what made the show what it is today. The people who worked on the show were working in a visual medium, and as Chris Carter states in the foreword “the show somehow managed to turn that rectangle box we all viewed each week into something special and often unexpected.”
In addition, the book recalls the TV antecedents (Kolchak: The Night Stalker) and descendants (Fringe) of The X-Files, examines the two feature films, and investigates Chris Carter’s other creations, including Millennium, The Lone Gunmen, Harsh Realm, and The After. Featuring numerous stills and the show’s most prominent writers and directors, The X-Files FAQ allows readers to relive the “Mytharc” conspiracy and the unforgettable monsters of the week – from the Fluke Man to the Peacocks.
John Kenneth Muir speaks with Mr. Media
John Kenneth Muir, author of The X-Files FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Global Conspiracy, Aliens, Lazarus Species, and Monsters of the Week, spoke with Bob Andelman aka Mr. Media! They spoke about the appeal of The X-Files and Muir’s massive collection of sci-fi, fantasy and genre toys. Click play in the video below to learn more!
The X-Files FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Global Conspiracy, Aliens, Lazarus Species, and Monsters of the Week explores Chris Carter’s popular 1990s science-fiction TV series, which aired on Fox for nine seasons and inspired spin-offs, including feature films, TV shows, toys, novels, and comic books. The book explores the series in terms of its historical context and analyzes how many of the episodes tackle the events of their time: the Clinton era. The X-Files FAQ also tallies the episodes that are based on true stories, selects touchstone moments from the almost decade-long run, and organizes the series by its fantastic subject matter – from serial killers to aliens, from prehistoric menaces to ethnic and religious-based horrors.
The X-Files FAQ also features a foreword written by screenwriter Chris Carter who credits John Muir for his impressive and thoughtful musings. In the book you’ll read that the writing on the show, X-Files, was only half what made the show what it is today. The people who worked on the show were working in a visual medium, and as Chris Carter states in the foreword “the show somehow managed to turn that rectangle box we all viewed each week into something special and often unexpected.”
John Kenneth Muir visits XFILESNEWS
The X-Files FAQ author, John Kenneth Muir, was a guest recently on The X-Files News Podcast, hosted by feature editor Ky Johnson. Listen to the full podcast below!
>>LISTEN HERE<<
The X-Files FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Global Conspiracy, Aliens, Lazarus Species, and Monsters of the Week explores Chris Carter’s popular 1990s science-fiction TV series, which aired on Fox for nine seasons and inspired spin-offs, including feature films, TV shows, toys, novels, and comic books. The book explores the series in terms of its historical context and analyzes how many of the episodes tackle the events of their time: the Clinton era. The X-Files FAQ also tallies the episodes that are based on true stories, selects touchstone moments from the almost decade-long run, and organizes the series by its fantastic subject matter – from serial killers to aliens, from prehistoric menaces to ethnic and religious-based horrors.
The X-Files FAQ also features a foreword written by screenwriter Chris Carter who credits John Muir for his impressive and thoughtful musings. In the book you’ll read that the writing on the show, X-Files, was only half what made the show what it is today. The people who worked on the show were working in a visual medium, and as Chris Carter states in the foreword “the show somehow managed to turn that rectangle box we all viewed each week into something special and often unexpected.”
In addition, the book recalls the TV antecedents (Kolchak: The Night Stalker) and descendants (Fringe) of The X-Files, examines the two feature films, and investigates Chris Carter’s other creations, including Millennium, The Lone Gunmen, Harsh Realm, and The After. Featuring numerous stills and the show’s most prominent writers and directors, The X-Files FAQ allows readers to relive the “Mytharc” conspiracy and the unforgettable monsters of the week – from the Fluke Man to the Peacocks.
Wes Craven passes away at 76
Wes Craven, the most successful director of the Horror genre, has passed away. The man who created A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream franchise was 76. John Kenneth Muir’s profile of Craven from his book Horror Films FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Slashers, Vampires, Zombies, Aliens, and More is below. In addition, Muir paid tribute to the director yesterday on his own blog, Reflections on Film and Television.
Before becoming one of the horror genre’s most successful directors, Wes Craven taught English at Westminster College and philosophy at Clarkson University. After becoming an editor for Sean Cunningham (Friday the 13th) in New York City, Craven wrote and directed his first horror film, The Last House on the Left (1972), a nihilistic remake of Ingmar Bergman’s spiritual film The Virgin Spring (1960).
Craven continued in a “savage cinema” vein with a follow-up film about “white bread” Americans battling desperate desert cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) before retooling his movie aesthetic and becoming the godfather of “rubber reality” (see Chapter 21). In films of this type, a highly charismatic and usually highly verbal serial killer is able to manipulate the bounds of reality itself to trap and murder his victims. Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) saw Freddy Krueger lording it over teens in the dreamworld, while Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) involved hallucinatory visions and dreams from the world of Haitian voodoo. In Shocker (1989), Craven imagined Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi), a serial killer who could move deftly through different channels on the television landscape.
In 1994, Craven reinvented himself again and became the guru of “meta” or postmodern horror. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) was the seventh entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but importantly it reintroduced Freddy as a “real-life” ancient demon. The characters in the film, including Heather Langenkamp (playing herself), came to the Pirandello-esque conclusion that they were not merely real people, but also characters in an ongoing script called life.
Craven perfected his “meta” approach to film in the self-referential Scream series, written by Kevin Williamson which involved a serial killer called Ghostface who knew all the clichés and conventions of the horror film. Similarly, Scream 2 (1997) involved a killer obsessed with sequels, Scream 3 (2000) trilogies, and Scream 4 (2011) remakes and reboots.
Stephen King’s Horror Films
The talented and prolific Stephen King is 65 years old today! Now we can celebrate with an excerpt from Horror Films FAQ, written by John Kenneth Muir.
Although the horror film has frequently adapted literary material in its long history, from Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley to Thomas Harris and Dean Koontz, perhaps no writer has seen his work translated to the silver screen more often the oft-named “master of horror,” Stephen King (1947– ). King is a longtime resident of Maine and sets most of his stories in that region. And as a young man, the author was reportedly inspired to become a horror writer by the works of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).
The writer of more than 50 novels and 200 short stories, King has written books selling more than 350 million copies worldwide. He has earned multiple honors, including the Bram Stoker Award and, controversially, the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Suffering an identical fate to many authors who choose horror as the avenue for their storytelling, King’s work is often dismissed out of hand as lowbrow when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. King’s work often deals directly with the American blue-collar experience and the interfacing of that experience with the supernatural or paranormal. His protagonists are often a circle of friends reckoning with something outside the human experience but using their bond of friendship to defeat it.
Since 1976 and Brian De Palma’s cinematic adaptation of King’s novel Carrie, several dozen of King’s works have been adapted to film, television, and even the stage. “The simple fact is that King’s stories and novels have provided a wealth of materials for filmmakers,” writes King biographer Michael R. Collings. “Almost every novel published under King’s name has been produced as a film, is in production, or has been optioned.”
Furthermore, writes another King scholar, Tony Magistrale, “Between box office receipts and film rental distribution around the world, the Stephen King movie business is now worth well in excess of a billion dollars.” Tellingly, King’s most critically acclaimed film adaptations have emerged from outside the horror genre. Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Green Mile (1999) have all been met with kudos and award nominations, whereas the horror films have achieved far less acceptance. In the eyes of judgmental, “elitist critics,” writes Mark Browning, “the films are associated with a cinematic subgenre with historically low status [horror] and secondly, the films are adapting overtly popular, best-selling writer who is commonly associated with this particular genre in literature.”
Clearly, however, the horror-film adaptations of Stephen King’s literary works have created a dilemma of “authorship” for many who admire the books. Audiences familiar with King’s novels bring high expectations to the theater that often can’t be met since film is a different art form than literature, and settings, events, and characters are sometimes eliminated, combined, or changed to so as to vet the cleanest, most concise narrative.
Secondly, many of the directors who have crafted films based on King’s work are of an unusually high caliber. As auteurs, they inevitably bring their own creative aesthetic to any filming of a King story. Thus King’s vision is changed or sublimated to accommodate the vision of the director in question. The result is that the images onscreen abundantly represent a hybrid vision: Stephen King through the lens of Brian De Palma (Carrie), Stephen King through the lens of Kubrick (The Shining), or Stephen King through the lens of John Carpenter (Christine).
Horror Films FAQ explores a century of ghoulish and grand horror cinema, gazing at the different characters, situations, settings, and themes featured in the horror film, from final girls, monstrous bogeymen, giant monsters and vampires to the recent torture porn and found footage formats. The book remembers the J-Horror remake trend of the 2000s, and examines the oft-repeated slasher format popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980).
The Birds
The following is an excerpt posted by Bookgasm of Horror Films FAQ, written by John Kenneth Muir. Check out the rest of the excerpt here.
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds opens on a seemingly normal day in the early 1960s with attractive Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) visiting a bird shop in scenic San Francisco. As she enters, a flock of birds is seen in the distance among the skyscrapers: circling and cawing but otherwise nonthreatening. This view is a deliberate foreshadowing of what is to come, a simmering before the inevitable boil.
Once Melanie is in the store, however, things do heat up. She attempts to pull a prank on a handsome man, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), by pretending to be a bird-shop employee. But Mitch, who claims to be there to purchase two “love birds,” is actually pulling a prank of his own and soon gets the better of Melanie.
This game of cat and mouse spurs a veritable obsession in Melanie, and she soon tracks Mitch to his home, sixty miles up the coast in scenic Bodega Bay, a little hamlet described as a “a collection of shacks on a hillside.” Her not-so covert mission is to initiate a sexual relationship with Mitch. Melanie does so under the guise of delivering him his love birds.
Once in town, Melanie also meets the town’s schoolteacher, Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), another woman who once shared an intimate relationship with the apparently promiscuous Mitch. There is a quick rivalry between Annie and Melanie, and some jealousy, too. Meanwhile, as Melanie grows closer to Mitch, she is looked upon with stern disapproval by Mitch’s shrewish, controlling mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy). Lydia is a cold, emotionally closed off woman, still despondent over the death of her husband years earlier.
While all these tumultuous personal relationships shift and grow, the inexplicable suddenly occurs. Birds of all varieties launch a coordinated attack on Bodega Bay, ambushing the local school, killing Annie, dive-bombing the local diner, and laying merciless siege to Mitch’s family farmhouse, a location reachable primarily by motor boat and therefore isolated…
Today, The Birds has lost little of the searing dramatic punch that captivated audiences four decades ago. The lack of a scientific or rational explanation behind the avian attack lends the film a powerful and undeniably sexual subtext. The bird attacks, one can detect upon close viewing, occur because of turbulent human emotions. In short, this film is all about not just the birds, but the bees.
Keep reading at Bookgasm!
Horror Films FAQ explores a century of ghoulish and grand horror cinema, gazing at the different characters, situations, settings, and themes featured in the horror film, from final girls, monstrous bogeymen, giant monsters and vampires to the recent torture porn and found footage formats. The book remembers the J-Horror remake trend of the 2000s, and examines the oft-repeated slasher format popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980).
After an introduction positioning the horror film as an important and moral voice in the national dialogue, the book explores the history of horror decade by decade, remembering the women’s liberation horrors of the 1970s, the rubber reality films of the late 1980s, the serial killers of the 1990s, and the xenophobic terrors of the 9/11 age. Horror Films FAQ also asks what it means when animals attack in such films as The Birds (1963) or Jaws (1975), and considers the moral underpinnings of rape-and-revenge movies, such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Irreversible (2002). The book features numerous photographs from the author’s extensive personal archive, and also catalogs the genre’s most prominent directors.
Splice
The following is an excerpt from Horror Films FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Slashers, Vampires, Zombies, Aliens, and More by John Kenneth Muir.
Splice reaches all the way back to an obscure 1976 “science run amok” horror flick starring Rock Hudson and Barbara Carrera, titled Embryo. In that effort from director Ralph Nelson, a scientist named Paul Holliston (Hudson) reshaped a fourteen-week-old human fetus with “placental lactagen,” a special growth hormone.
What he created, in a matter of days, was a fully formed twenty-five-year-old woman, Carrera’s Victoria, who knew nothing of the world and therefore was never appropriately socialized. Holliston taught his creation to read the Bible, to play chess, and to otherwise entertain him, before eventually becoming his “daughter’s” lover, too. In Embryo, the amoral Victoria was driven to commit murder over a hormonal imbalance that caused her to age and wither at a highly accelerated rate.
Splice boasts remarkable similarities. Vincenzo Natali’s film involves two incredibly arrogant twenty-first-century genetic engineers, Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody), who decide to introduce human DNA into their revolutionary experiments involving chimeras. And yes indeed, Elsa and Clive are named after the great actors who played the lead roles in the landmark 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein: Elsa Lanchester and Colin Clive.
Working in secret for a big pharmaceutical corporation, Elsa and Clive create a not-quite-human creature called Dren (first Abigail Chu and then Delphine Chaneau), a female being that is part amphibious. Dren also boasts an accelerated life span, which means she will live, age, and die while Elsa and Clive can watch and take notes. She’s their living petri dish.
Like Embryo’s Victoria before her, Dren is lonely, confused, and unsocialized, and Elsa, especially at first, treats the creature has her own biological child. There are good reasons for this, as the film makes clear in the later sequences set on Elsa’s wintry and foreboding family farm. Specifically, Elsa used her own DNA to create the “human” part of Dren.
But unfortunately, this family faces a crisis. As an adolescent, Dren turns her burgeoning physical affections unexpectedly toward her “father,” Clive, much in the same fashion as occurred in Embryo.
Yet what makes Splice more than just a variation on an old tale like Embryo is its laserlike focus on the concept of Elsa and Clive not just as bad, mad scientists, necessarily, but as bad parents. Together, Elsa, Clive, and Dren form a family unit, yet the parents here don’t seem to take their familial responsibilities seriously. Dren wants to bond with the adults, and still they just consider her a “mistake” they made after, on a whim, noting, “What’s the worst that could happen?” when they decided to make a life.
Splice concerns those things that occur when irresponsibility conceiving a life is followed by a deeper moral wrong: irresponsibility in rearing that life. Elsa quickly proves to be a psychologically troubled, capricious mother figure, playing out her own personal family drama on this new and innocent creation. One scene finds Elsa cruelly and vindictively strapping Dren to a surgical table and slicing off a portion of her “alien” anatomy. It’s a genuinely disturbing moment from an emotional standpoint.. The first thing Elsa does is take off Dren’s clothes, an indication that the girl is not human to her, no more than a specimen. A mother’s “love” can be taken away just like that, apparently, when the maternal figure feels displeasure.
Then weak-willed Clive makes the ultimate physical and emotional betrayal and has sexual intercourse with Dren, an adolescent who considers him a father figure. At best, he’s weak. At worst, he’s monstrous. And that’s the key to understanding Splice and its modus operandi. The “monsters” here are Elsa and Clive, two arrogant, flippant, self-involved scientists/parents who, through their ill-considered actions, irreparably harm another individual, an innocent individual. Dren may be genetically different from her parents, but she is nonetheless a result of her biological nature, which they created, and her terrible upbringing, which they are also responsible for. Dren might be inhuman, but Elsa and Clive are inhumane.
Like Karloff’s monster in the 1930s, audiences feel tremendous sympathy for the Dren character. When she commits the equivalent of a rape at film’s end, when she is no longer quite the Dren we know and recognize, the horrid act may be all about instinct and the biological imperative of all living things to reproduce. Or it may be about the fact that she was emotionally and sexually violated by a man she trusted and loved. What did she learn from this act? And from Elsa’s cruel, heartless domination? Like parent, like child? Dren was abused, and now she is the abuser.
From the movie’s very first shot, in which the audiences gaze out of the birth canal at parents Clive and Elsa, Splice asks viewers to contextualize the film as a story about what it means to be a parent. It asks the viewer to weigh this couple’s behavior and ask some important moral questions about it. Is this another life, or is this just an experiment? Is this about another being’s sovereignty and rights, or is it about “what we can learn”? As parents, what are our responsibilities to new life? Although Clive and Elsa possess special talents vis-à-vis their creation of life, they aren’t out of the norm in how they see child rearing.
In Splice, the film mirrors the life of a parent, from a child’s conception through adolescence, but with two “bad” parents as surrogates and negative examples. When Dren is first born, Elsa and Clive lose a lot of sleep, have no time for intimacy, and worry about things like messy feeding times. And while taking care of their child around the clock, their work at the office suffers.
Anyone who has raised a baby knows how authentic these moments feel. Sleep deprivation. Frustration. Loneliness. But there is also great joy as your infant starts to become an individual with a real personality and takes amazing first steps into the larger world: speaking, relating, learning. These passages involving Dren’s growth and development in Splice are simply stellar, and deeply affecting in a very human, very intimate way.
But this is a horror film, of course, and something goes wrong. At some point, Elsa and Clive forsake their roles as parents, and when threatened by Dren’s rebellion in adolescence, they try to write her off as an “experiment.” They try to control her; rein her in, make her act in the fashion they desire.
At some point, children stop being cuddly and fun and start to become demanding, rebellious, and self-directed. A good parent allows that growth to happen responsibly, and a bad parent begins to act antagonistically and imperiously. Bad parents fail to recognize their children as individuals and not as extensions of their own desires. That’s what happens to Clive and Elsa. When they don’t like what Dren has done, they shout, “This experiment is over.” Like that’s the end of it. Like the life they created just never existed, never flourished, never interacted with them.
So while Splice is a view of arrogant, out-of-control, cutting-edge science and its practitioners, it is also a bracing view of arrogant, out-of-control bad parenting.
Horror Films FAQ explores a century of ghoulish and grand horror cinema, gazing at the different characters, situations, settings, and themes featured in the horror film, from final girls, monstrous bogeymen, giant monsters and vampires to the recent torture porn and found footage formats. The book remembers the J-Horror remake trend of the 2000s, and examines the oft-repeated slasher format popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980).
Visit the author’s blog.
Shaun of the Dead
Today is the U.S. release of The World’s End, the third in the Cornetto Trilogy by director Edgar Wright. To celebrate, we thought that we would have a look at the first movie in the trilogy, Shaun of the Dead. And don’t forget to check out Wright’s Shaun of the Dead interactive screenplay. The following is an excerpt from Horror Films FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Slashers, Vampires, Zombies, Aliens, and More by John Kenneth Muir (Applause Books), which will be in stores in two weeks.
If the latter Evil Dead films found comedy in horror through the art of exaggeration and gory overkill, the 2004 film from director Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead, locates another route to genuine laughter. In particular, the film carefully observes life for a series of young, aimless, directionless characters both before and during the zombie apocalypse. Through this careful observation, the film concludes that the more things change, the more they stay the same. At least at first.
In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun (Simon Pegg) is upset when his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), breaks up with him on their three-year anniversary because he has no plans for his life. Although Shaun’s best buddy, Ed (Nick Frost), assures Shaun that losing Liz is no big deal, Shaun feels he’s got to make things right. Unfortunately, a zombie apocalypse occurs on the very day he chooses to make that happen, and he must save not only Liz, but his mother, Barbara (Penelope Wilton), from hordes of flesh-eating ghouls. In the increasingly tense and difficult battle for survival, Shaun ultimately finds his voice and his spine, and reunites with Liz.
The opening sequence in Shaun of the Dead showcases average people quietly getting up to go work, but in emotionally and mentally checked-out terms. Hardly anyone makes eye contact with anyone else. And Shaun’s long yawn of boredom could easily be mistaken for a zombie’s grimace.
After the zombie apocalypse commences, Wright restages the film’s inaugural tracking shot—this time featuring actual zombies, not just bored, checked-out humans—and Shaun doesn’t even notice the difference. In the Romero living-dead films, the sometimes not-too-subtle point is that the zombies are “us.” In Shaun of the Dead, the point is that many humans live their daily lives as if already zombies.
Accordingly, the film’s running verbal gag—“you’ve got red on you”—expresses the idea that things tend to stay the same, no matter what changes in Shaun’s life. At first, he’s got red ink on his white shirt. Later, it’s spilled blood. The zombie apocalypse has changed less about his life than one might suspect.
Beyond the observational humor, horror fans will find Shaun of the Dead amusing because it continually references other horror films in funny yet situation-appropriate ways. For instance, when tasked with rescuing Shaun’s Mum, Ed notes, “We’re coming to get you, Barbara,” a recitation (and reparsing) of Johnny’s famous line in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead (“They’re coming to get you, Barbara”). At another point, a character implores another to “Join us,” adopting the refrain of the Deadites in the Evil Dead cycle.
Before the film is done, it also features verbal name checks of Ken Foree (a lead actor in Dawn of the Dead) and Ash (the lead character of The Evil Dead). These moments may qualify as throwaway ones, but they affirm to horror fans that Shaun of the Dead’s makers know their stuff, even while subverting their genre material to comic ends.
There’s also a very funny “self-recognition” factor in Shaun of the Dead. Shaun allows his mom and stepfather and his obnoxious friend Ed to dictate his life and future. He lives in a world of petty grievances, fart jokes, junk food, constant video games, and unending movie references. This is indeed the life of modern geekdom for many. But by navigating Z-Day (the Zombie Day), Shaun finally establishes his independence from parents and juvenile best buddy. He has put Ed, now a zombie, in an appropriate compartment of his life (in the shed, to be precise) rather than let that aspect of his life dominate his grown-up relationship with Liz.
Shaun of the Dead is utterly brilliant in execution. Whether choreographing a battle with the zombies to a song from Queen, or making half-noticed asides about zombies being perfect employees in the service industry, the film impresses with its sense of pace and nimble humor. The important thing, however, is that no matter how hard one laughs with the film’s joke, the filmmakers also get right the scary, gory sequences. The horror scenes, with zombies invading the Winchester Pub, for instance, are still chilling, and in the end, there are life-and-death consequences for Shaun and his friends. The laughs, while ubiquitous, manage not to undercut the sense of danger to Ed, Barbara, Shaun, Liz, and the others, and that’s what makes the film a horror-comedy instead of a comedy-horror film.
Horror Films FAQ explores a century of ghoulish and grand horror cinema, gazing at the different characters, situations, settings, and themes featured in the horror film, from final girls, monstrous bogeymen, giant monsters and vampires to the recent torture porn and found footage formats. The book remembers the J-Horror remake trend of the 2000s, and examines the oft-repeated slasher format popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980).
Visit the author’s blog.
Happy Birthday to Prince!
Prince is 52 years old today. To celebrate his birthday, enjoy an excerpt from Purple Rain by John Kenneth Muir. The passage deals with Albert Magnoli’s first encounter with Prince before agreeing to direct the rock musical drama film Purple Rain.
Then Magnoli was taken to actually meet with Prince. In a hotel lobby, Magnoli first met Chick, Prince’s legendary, Nordic bodyguard, whom Magnoli described as a very “tall, Viking-looking person,” and then went off to a corner to observe the dynamics of the situation.
“To my right were the elevator doors,” Magnoli explains. “To my left, across the lobby, was the front door of the building, where Steve [Fargnoli] and Chick were positioned. Then the doors opened at the crack of midnight sharp and out walks Prince by himself.
“Because he didn’t know who I was, he didn’t see me. He saw Chick and Steve at the end of the hall and walked to them, which allowed me to do a right-to-left pan with Prince, unencumbered by him knowing I was looking at him. As a result, I ended up filling [in] the whole story based on him walking across the lobby. Because what I saw was extreme vulnerability, in spite all of the bluster and the costume and the music. This was a vulnerable young man. I saw all the heart and soul. I saw all the emotional stuff. I saw the tragedy of his upbringing. I just saw stuff and felt stuff that filled in the three-act story.”
Together, Prince, Magnoli, Cavallo, Farnoli, and Chick went to a working dinner. “I was looking at Prince and I could tell he didn’t like being looked at,” Magnoli says. “He’s very shy. Everybody ordered food, and as soon as the waitress left, Prince looked at me sand said, ‘Okay, how did you like my script?’
“I realized a few things there. One, he said, ‘my script,’ which meant he had personally invested himself in whatever it was that William Blinn had written. And two, he hadn’t been told anything that I felt about it.”
“The words that came out of my mouth were the following: ‘Well, I think it sucked.’”
Magnoli pauses for dramatic effect. “At that moment, Steve dropped his head, Chick leaned closer to me, and Prince looked startled. Then I could see him thinking and what he was thinking was: ‘I wasn’t told this before this meeting was to take place. Why wasn’t I told? Then he looked toward Steve, because obviously Steve had told him nothing. That look to Steve took about three seconds, but it was telling to me, because I saw now how the operation worked. He had been kept in the dark about this.”
“So then Prince looked back to me and said, ‘Why does it suck?’ And I said, ‘You know what, it’s not important why, but here’s what we can do about it. Let me tell you the story.’ So now, with even more passion, because I have more information now that I’m looking at this kid, I told this story.
“There was five seconds of silence. Then he looked at Steve and said, ‘Why don’t you take Chick and go home.’ Then he looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ ‘I’m just going to take Al for a ride.’”
Not knowing exactly what was going to happen, Magnoli remembers feeling a little uncertain. Had he offended Prince? Had he made him angry?
“We got in his car; he got behind the wheel, I got into the passenger’s seat, and he took off fast,” Magnoli notes. “The next thing I knew, we were driving in pitch-black darkness, [with] not a light in sight. I had no idea where we were. It looked like we were driving in a black tube. A day later I realized we were in horizon-to-horizon farmland, but there were no lights. So I was thinking, he didn’t like the story…and now I’m dead. I can die right now. And no one will know…”
This nighttime ride was not the beginning of a murder plot, however, but the start of a very fruitful working relationship for Magnoli and Prince. Even though the story Magnoli had recounted involved the lead character (Prince himself, hereafter called “The Kid”) being at odds with his parents, his bandmates, and even his girlfriend, Prince never once flinched from a warts-and-all, three-dimensional presentation.
In the summer of 1984, a small, low-budget film came out of nowhere and unexpectedly debuted at the number one slot at the box office, unseating reigning champion Ghostbusters and making its star, Prince, a household name. By the end of the year, the film was a multiple-award winner, a trend setter in terms of fashion, and recognized on many prominent critical “top ten” lists. Purple Rain: Music on Film explores in detail the behind-the-scenes struggles and triumphs of the film’s making, from the trouble casting a female lead to star opposite Prince, to concerns that the movie’s urban vibe and sound wouldn’t play in Peoria. Featuring extensive new interviews with the film’s director, producer, and assistant editor, Purple Rain reveals a 1980s cult-classic as you’ve never seen, heard or experienced it before. Let’s go crazy…
Onstage & Backstage 