Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate. London: Arrow, 2012.
Acclaimed English novelist Jeanette Winterson’s latest book is something of a curiousity.
The book has been published by Arrow in partnership with famed British horror film studio Hammer, who have commissioned a series of horror novellas which according to the back cover spiel “will span the literary and the market, the esoteric and the commercial, by some of today’s most celebrated authors.”
Emma Donoghue. Room: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company: New York, 2010.
Disclaimer: Room is a novel that is impossible to discuss without revealing some plot points. Consider yourself warned.
We keep human horror in a box, and the media helps us do it. The stories haunt the public imagination long after we hear them: A woman held for 17 years in a small bedroom in Naples, Italy—her punishment for conceiving a child out of wedlock. Another daughter locked away by her father in a small Austrian village for 24 years, forced to submit to routine rapes and bearing seven children. “The worst crime in Austrian history,” everyone says. We nod, not thinking of the fact that one of the major genocides of the twentieth century happened not far from this crime. If we are lucky enough to have escaped firsthand encounters with mass atrocity, we find it difficult to understand. It seems too big. But these stories happened just last year or the year before. They happened to suburban people not completely unlike us. They stay with us.
On the surface, “Let Me In” is the perfect metaphor for the Hollywood vampires draining the life from the corpse of youthful, vibrant, European filmmaking before the blood has cooled. Like the recent evolution of the nosferatu in cinema or on television, the infection spreads too quickly – the English-language remake of “Let The Right One In” rising from the cutting room floor to take sinister refuge in the darkness of the multiplex. Continue reading
“Education, education, education.” New Labour’s old mantra rings hollow to English teacher Robert Anderson. This venerable warhorse stalks his classroom with the kind of “Dark sarcasm” that forced Roger Waters to write “The Wall.”
Ritual humiliation has served the craggy faced practitioner well his entire career – and if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it. That is until Anderson’s luck runs out. Giving a pain in the arse student an F is one thing, rubbing their nose in it is another, so when the head butt comes his way, the teacher’s world falls apart. Continue reading
At the end of “28 Weeks Later”, the screaming British zombies surged through the channel tunnel to upset the Parisians with lack of fashion sense, inadequate language skills (RARGGGHHH) and appalling diet.
The Brits have long admired French fine dining (well, maybe not the snails, frogs and horse meat), so why begrudge them one final chance to eat out abroad? Continue reading
“Rec 2” doesn’t muck about. From the off Spanish directors Jamie Balaguero and Paco Plaza get straight down to business as they sling us into the back of a SWAT van with four heavily armed hombres just minutes after the bloody events of the original film.
“Bring everything,” growls the chief as his men bristle with shotguns, assault rifles, pistols and battering rams. You just know they’re going to need the lot before this mission is over. It’s tempting to shout, “How about bringing some more guys” as “Rec 2” gears up to throw everything in the horror arsenal at these unsuspecting bad boys. Continue reading
Halfway into the new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the young heroine disrobes and steps into a hot bath. As she peels off her robe, some men at the screening I’m sitting in holler, “Yeah! Alriiiiiight!” in anticipation. But before her garment can complete its descent, the image cuts to a shot framed above the waist, of her naked back.
The crowd: “Ahhh, maaan!” In a film that has thus far rubbed our faces in a series of graphic stabbings and assaults, NOW the filmmakers suddenly get shy? That’s all right: The next shot parks the camera smack between her wide open legs, at water level in the tub. “Awriiiight!” After a contemplative interval, Freddy Kreuger’s razor glove rises out of the water like a stainless steel erection. “Woooo!”
One thing about the new Elm Street: It gets the crowd hooting better than a Yankee Stadium pipe organ.
Writer/director Conor McPherson’s “The Eclipse,” based on a short story by Billy Roche, is a bittersweet romance with a gothic horror twist set in a sleepy Irish seaside town. The film follows single parent Michael Farr (a revelatory Ciarán Hinds) as he struggles to come to terms with both the death of his wife and the impending demise of her father – not to mention terrifying ghosts that appear at random. Continue reading
In 2019, vampires are the dominant species on the planet. Only 5% of the human population remains. Edward Dalton, a human sympathiser played by Ethan Hawke, works frantically to find a blood substitute before mortal man is harvested to extinction by “Bromley Marks,” the company he works for.
What ultimately saves “Daybreakers” from being sucked up and spat out in the current deluge of fang fiction is its central idea; what is the point of being a vampire when everyone else around you is too? The Spierig brothers accomplish this by stripping their bloodsuckers of all their normal superpowers and turn them into something far more terrifying: corporate America. Continue reading
Finnish rockers The 69 Eyes have been around since the 80′s, but it’s only recently that they’ve begun to make inroads into the American market. With a new vampire-themed album released just in time to capture the bloodsucker-friendly zeitgeist, they’re currently hitting the road in the hopes of connecting with old fans and finding themselves some new ones.
Kirsty Evans sat down with frontman Jyrki right before the first show of the tour in San Francisco to talk about cartoony horror bands, old school rock and roll, and what makes Finnish bands unique.
Kirsty: This isn’t your first time in San Francisco, right?
Jyrki: No, this is the 4th. We’ve been here a couple of times headlining ourselves and then we played at The Fillmore with Cradle of Filth, which was brilliant.
That’s a strange combination.
I don’t think so. Cradle of Filth is kind of a cartoonish black metal band and we’re kind of the same, like a cartoon rock band.
That’s interesting, because when bands that audiences here aren’t familiar with open for American bands, the audiences can sometimes be a little hostile.
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