Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby Doo

 

Scooby Diving

Zoinks! The Spooky 
Folklore Behind Scooby Doo
By Mark Norman
Chin Beard Books and Oak Tree Books
ISBN 9781837916702

Well this was a pretty fantastic Birthday present for me this year, it has to be said. I originally saw it on BlueSky when one of the people I follow, Raskolnik highlighted it in a post and, it turns out Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby Doo, pretty much does what it says on the tin, written by a leading UK folklore scholar who I will need to look into at some point in the future, for sure. 

The book is split into seven chapters, bookended by an intro and outro from figures behind the scenes of various of the many variants of the show through the years, not to mention a large appendix of episode guide style lists too. Right away from the start, I was hooked in by the author with Chapter One, Colleges and Cannabis - Scooby Doo Legends In The Real World. 

And this one is a little different from most of the other chapters in the book, in that it investigates the myths created by the show itself and its influence on the world around it... before diving into the other chapters which live up, in no uncertain terms, to the title of the book. This chapter was extremely illuminating for this particular reader, as I haven’t seen many iterations of the show over the years, it has to be said. For example I discovered that, while Scooby-Doo is written... well,  as I just wrote it... in the majority of TV and film properties of the brand, the original first two seasons from the 1960s and 70s correctly write it as Scooby Doo. This is because Doo is actually Scooby’s family name, with Scooby itself being a shortening of his real name, one Scoobert Doo.

Also, although she’s had occasional relationships with men in the series, it would seem that Velma is actually written as a lesbian. And did you know that the term ‘jinkies’ comes from a historical and less blasphemous version of ‘By Jove’? And, furthermore, ‘Zoinks!’ might well have derived from ‘gadzooks’, or rather ‘God’s hooks’. The writer also discusses how much of the folklore of various areas and times was either fuelled by... and in some instances completely created from thin air... various smugglers over the years, in order to keep upstanding citizens, or possibly just some ‘meddling kids’, away from their areas of operation, by scaring people off with the imagery and ‘cosplay’ of said myth. 
 
Chapter Two, Landscape And The Gothic looks at the visual tropes of the ‘state of being gothic’ such as run down crumbling architecture and the appearance of the full moon. Indeed, it even shows how a crescent moon on the show set in one night will suddenly become a full moon for events taking place on the next night, purely to fulfil that gothic vision and tone of the show, flying in the face of continuity. 

Chapter Three, Gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts is an interesting chapter also, with many stereotypes of ghosts from various literary wells explained, especially as to how they are visually depicted. For instance, in the mid fifteenth to eighteenth century, it was common for the recently deceased to be wrapped in a winding cloth or shroud and be placed in the ground wrapped in that... because only the wealthy could afford such luxury items as a coffin. Hence the depiction of ghosts as being seen as sheet wearing spirits. Reports of a ghost in Hammersmith in 1803 further fuelled this depiction. Also covered in this chapter... which I won’t go into too much here... are the origins of the visual variant of some ghosts being depicted bound in chains and also the variant of an empty, animated suit of armour. As well as such phenomena as mirror ghosts, curses, Crystallomancy, seances, psychics, spirit boards, Knockers in mines and Civil War ghosts.

Chapter Four, Snips and Snails, Witches in Scooby Doo, looks at such things as Tasseomancy and the derivation of the term hag coming from ‘Hægtesse’, which means witch in Middle English. While Chapter Five, Indigenous, Ancient and Non-Western Cultures looks at cryptids such as the abominable snowman, big foot, Japanese dragons, Chinese dragons, Jinn and even at places like Shangri La or communities such as the Mayan and Aztec Civilisations.

Chapter Six, Urban Legends and Folklore Motifs looks at exactly that, with such star performers as Spring Heeled Jack from Victorian times. It also accredits Richard Dorson as the person who first came up with the term ‘urban legend’ in 1968. Very interestingly, it looks at how familiar and reinvented modern legends are, in fact, not modern inventions at all but ones which have echoed down through history over the years. So the myth of alligators living and growing in the sewers saw its predecessor in Roman times, where it was believed that there were octopuses living in the sewers. 

The seventh and final chapter, Thoroughly Modern Scooby gets very up to date with stuff such as the recent rise of the fear of clowns and the, perhaps not so modern, alien abduction phenomenon. Not to mention entering the somewhat dodgy realms of AI. 

And it’s an absolute joy to read, rendered in an entertaining writing style with lots of fun, informative facts. My one criticism would be in reference to the Scooby Snack. While noting that capsules made from psychedelic mushroom psilocybe cubensis are nick-named Scooby Snacks in the real life drug community, after the show, the writer informs us that said treat was not in the show until the 1980s... a relatively modern phenomena. However, this didn’t quite ring true to me and it glitched in my brain... so I went back to my CD recording of the original theme song from 1969 and found the Scooby Snack is definitely mentioned in the lyrics. Perhaps in a more general sense of a plethora of snacks in the show but, nonetheless, it’s right there. 

But it’s a minor criticism and, all in all, I’d have to say I was completely blown away by Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby Doo and it’s a hard recommend for me. I might have to track down the original show I remember growing up with in the early seventies as repeats on the BBC if I can find a decent Blu Ray at some point. Although I have bad memories of canned laughter plaguing the show too. But, however that pans out, this is a truly excellent book by a very entertaining writer and shouldn’t be missed, if this is the kind of thing you are interested in. 

Mr. Vampire III

Frying Tonight

Mr. Vampire III
aka Ling wan sin sang
aka Mr. Supernatural
Directed by Ricky Lau
Hong Kong 1987
Golden Harvest/Eureka
Blu Ray Zone B


Well this one is pretty great but, before I get on with giving you a short flavour of this movie, I have to first give you a word of caution about Mr. Vampire III. As the second film presented in a box set entitled Hopping Mad - The Mr. Vampire Sequels, you might expect to see some of the trademark hopping vampires in this movie. But you don’t... there’s not even a single vampire that enters the story at any point here, let alone a hopping one. A warning might have been conscientiously provided by Eureka on the Blu Ray box, one might have thought.

While the main actor from the previous two films, Ching-Ying Lam, returns as a character with the same name, who may or may not be the Taoist priest from the first movie (the action returns to ancient times for this movie, preceding the action of the second film, which was set in the 1980s), there is little to connect the two stories.

Having said all that, this movie starts off pretty strong with a comedy action packed opening sequence which then dovetails into... lots more of the same. In fact, one of the strengths of this movie over the other two is that it’s almost non-stop action with just the odd pause to explain to the audience what’s going on and to set up the next scene... but without lingering too much on the story mechanics and, thankfully, without taking itself too seriously in that department.

Okay, so no vampires but the film starts with a wandering Taoist priest, played by Richard Ng, who is conning a family by pretending to exorcise their very real ghosts for money. He uses his own ghosts, who collaborate with him to get the money and then are ‘exorcised’ safely in a taoist prison (in this case an umbrella he carries around from town to town) once the con has been performed. However, almost as soon as this comedy action sequence is complete, the real ghosts who have been bothering the homeowner arrive, a whole clan of them, who kick the priest and his ghosts out. So they flee to the next town where...

They are temporarily mistaken for horse thieves by a group of people protected by the wise Taoist monk played by Ching-Ying Lam. It’s not long before the real band of horse thieves attack the village and are revealed as black magic sorcerers and demons. From that point on and for the rest of the film, it’s a battle of wits... but mostly a battle of cleverly choreographed kung fu style moves, as the comedy and action sequences land one after another and, with this many going on, at least a few should be pretty entertaining. And I’d have to say that, yeah, it worked for me. Despite the absence of the titular hopping vampire, this one was a fast and energetic blend of similar elements to the first film but, done much better and this one didn’t drag in the slightest.

Lam and Ng are great as their respective Taoist monk characters and they make a great pairing here. Unfortunately the music is played for the comedy again, rather than supporting the comedy already inherent and, although there is a credited composer, Chin-Yung Shing, I also noticed in the credits that the use of an entity called the Cavendish Music Library was tapped so, I’m going to have to assume that some of this very broad comedy scoring was just needle dropped in (I hope).

And that’s really all I need to say about Mr. Vampire III, I think. The acting is not subtle (apart from Lam and Ng, I would say) and the basic story is not going to tax anyone or give them much they wouldn’t expect... except maybe the partially deep fried ghost who comes out of hot oil and attacks Ng, looking like a deep fried version of The Oily Maniac (reviewed here). But the film works in spite of all this and I had a good time with it. I’m quite looking forward to the next one now.

Ghost Watch

 

Ceci N’est
Pas Une Pipes

Ghost Watch
BBC 1992
Directed by Lesley Manning
BBC/101 FIlms DVD Region 2

In 1938, Orson Welles scared gazillions of listeners with his fake documentary style radio broadcast adaptation of War Of The Worlds, presented as newsflash interruptions to scheduled transmissions and panicking half of America. By 1992 you would have thought that nobody could fall for such a stunt again and, to be fair to the BBC, when they broadcast Ghostwatch for the only time it’s ever been allowed on terrestrial TV, on Halloween of that year, it was billed as being a drama and the intro to the programme presented it as the same. However, for people like me and many others in the UK, some of whom were tuning into it a little way in after a movie on another channel had finished, Ghostwatch was what the narrative presented itself to be... a live broadcast transmission of a novelty Halloween programme, a vigil where the BBC were watching over a haunted house where two young girls and a mother were being terrorised by an angry spirit.

And why shouldn’t we trust what we were seeing with our own eyes... the whole show is done exactly as a live BBC event would be and it was fronted by some very reliable TV presenters. Indeed, it was headed up by one of the most assured and authoritative, no nonsense TV show presenters ever, Michael Parkinson (who’s interview talk show Parkinson was a staple of British TV for a very long time) and he was accompanied by famous TV show presenters Mike Smith (in the studio taking phone calls), Smith’s wife and fellow presenter Sarah Greene (actually going into the house to spend time there for the night via one of a fair few live links) and even a young Craig Charles (then better known as a presenter of sorts, before he found fame as the star of Red Dwarf) as the ‘man on the street’, wrangling the crowds of onlookers, well wishers and amateur specialists in all things most haunted... as one of the many diversions which the writers used to make this absolutely feel like a typical, BBC live show.  Complete with phone ins, interviews with guests (played by actors and also non-professionals) and the usual arguments about “Is it real?”, “Is it just the girls faking things?” and, importantly to hold the tension and build up to the point where things, inevitably, start to go wrong... “Is anything going to happen tonight while we’ve got the cameras in there or is it all just a load of nonsense?”

For the most part, they did really well at maintaining the illusion that, not only spooky things were beginning to happen in the house but also quite openly hostile, threatening and downright unpleasant things which, as the show builds to its inevitable climax, leaves no viewer safe. Parkinson is aided in the studio, in the chair next to him, by parapsychologist Dr Lin Pascoe (played by Gillian Bevan), to argue against the cynics and, in the house with Sarah Greene and her film crew, we have the mother, played by Brid Brennan, along with her two fictional daughters played by Michelle and Cherise Wesson.

It’s nicely done. Looking back on it now you can see that the presenters were much better at this than a couple of the actors and they really carry the feeling that you are watching a live event. The various viewers flooding the phone boards to tell their stories for the show (and there was a real live line running too while the show aired, although not an interactive one as was being depicted on screen) gives it a very naturalistic feel as viewers see figures in recorded footage and then the hosts cue up the videos again to see what it is the viewers are telling them they can see. It all leads up to a climax where things get very bad, leading on to stories from viewers who are starting to experience poltergeist style breakages and trance like states in their children as they are watching the show.

Then, after a clever piece of chicanery where the cameras catch one of the girls faking it and starting more arguments about the ‘reality’ of ghosts on the show, it turns out she was just faking it for the viewers in case nothing happened that night... and then the real fireworks begin as one of the girls gets trapped in the cupboard under the stairs where the poltergeist, child molester Mr. Pipes (named by the girls after the sounds of the heating system making noises, which the early apparitions were originally confused with) originally killed himself and was eaten by a load of his own cats. Then, shortly after that, the sound man is knocked unconscious (or possibly killed, we never find out) and the lights die in the house. We are soon presented with a recovered live feed (do not adjust your sets folks... a slight technical hitch) and it’s Sarah Greene and the girls playing a board game in the downstairs and all appears well again... until Dr. Pascoe realises that the live feed is just repeat playing footage from earlier in the night and that the ‘ghost’ has got ‘in the machine’ as it were... the TV cameras acting as a huge, 'national seance' and letting the ghost into the houses of all the viewers. The lights in the studio die, ghost winds whip through the set and by the end of the show, it’s just glimpses of the still stalwart Michael Parkinson trying to figure out, with no crew there, if any of the cameras are still broadcasting, before he himself is visited by the spirit of Mr. Pipes. It all gets a bit like Nigel Kneale’s chaotic conclusion to Quatermass And The Pit, truth be told and the events themselves are obviously based on the real life events of the Enfield Poltergeist (which was even the basis for one of the sequels to The Conjuring).

And, yeah, by this point you’d think people would have realised that this was a bit over the top and a dramatisation... and many did. I mean, there are laughable things in this show. The cats on the soundtrack seem a little too clear and well done and, well, I don’t know whose idea it was to have the characters continually referring to the under the stairs cupboard as ‘the gloryhole’ but it certainly brought a smile to my face. It’s an old term which has been in use for centuries but, possibly, the more frequent sexual usage of the term wasn’t foremost in the minds of some viewers (and whoever passed the scripts at the BBC) so, I think someone was getting away with something there. Back in 1992 I would have been none the wiser, I suspect.

However, clearly people did believe what they were seeing. The show prompted huge amounts of complaints, the possible cause of a suicide of a teenager a few days later and it is apparently the first TV programme cited in the British Medical Journal as causing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in children. Consequently, the BBC have never themselves aired the show again but, if you lurk in the company of various horror fans and creators on the internet, people are still talking about this 'one off' broadcast and how influential it was to this day. I suspect many of those modern day ‘ghost hunting’ reality TV shows would not be around today had this not inadvertently paved the way for them to exist and thrive in a TV format.

All said and done, you can laugh (comfortably, from this century) at the last ten minutes of the show being a little too over the top and ‘going for it’ way too enthusiastically to be really effective but, television and its reception by viewers was a different thing back then, even as late as the early 1990s and... if you sat through the thing from fairly early on in the broadcast, the brilliant slow burn makes it almost impossible to not take it seriously. And if you’re not looking out for writer’s tricks to try to fool the audience because you a) believe it’s real and b) don’t think much will happen except for maybe a few noises on the microphones... then it’s only natural that viewers would let this thing get to them. And get to them it did.

So there you have it. Ghostwatch is a show that is still thought of with a certain amount of affection by fans of ghostly tales and if you are in that camp then you probably should take a look at this one to try and get some idea of what all the fuss was about. And, despite our cynical, jaded view of such things now, I think there’s a good reason why the BBC have never aired it again on their own stations, effectively banning it for quite a while on the airwaves... I think there are still quite a few people who, if they tuned into this by accident nowadays, would still be forgiven for thinking something sinister and unholy was reaching out from their television set to come and get them. The DVD is completely free of any extras (aside from that old chestnut, a menu) and my only criticism is that it really needs to get a Blu Ray release, fully loaded with some decent bonus features... it’s fitting that a dark TV phenomenon such as this one should get such a thing.

Pulse

Ghost To Ghost

Pulse
Japan 2001
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone A/B

Pulse was a bit of a mystery for me when I dove into the latest Arrow Blu Ray transfer of the movie from a year or so ago. For one reason... because I'd somehow never really heard of it before (or possibly I just forgot it).

That's a puzzle in itself because, back in the day, I used to be really into the whole j-horror thing. ‘Back in the day’ being when Ringu (the original and pretty much only great version of Ring) hit UK cinemas in the year 2000, two years after its first run release in Japan. It was a scary film and it wasn't too long before I was hooked on cinema releases of great Japanese horror movies such as Ju-On (aka The Grudge), Dark Water and The Eye.

Also, with the old DVD distributor Tartan Video picking up these and a whole host of sequels and close kin to these movies, it was a really great time to be getting into these kinds of celluloid horrors. Of course most, possibly even all, of those movies were destined for US remakes which I quite happily ignored, fairly safe in the knowledge (according to reports) that they were dumbed down, less interesting ‘knock offs’ of the originals.

One such remake, however, was indeed a US reworking of Pulse and so, like I said, a bit of a mystery that I'd never really registered this movie in my consciousness up until this Arrow edition although, it has to be said, I should maybe give the US remake of this one a go sometime in case it actually sheds some light as to what the heck this disjointed film was about, to be honest.

The film starts off with one set of characters who work in a nursery and one of them goes to investigate why a colleague has not turned up for work. After finding him at home but acting very distant, she gets distracted looking for a crucial disk at work and then turns around to find he has hanged himself. She takes the disk to the office and some mostly vague shenanigans occur which are almost but, not quite, spooky.

Then we switch to another set of characters who, to my stupid gaijin eyes, were the same characters I'd already been following except they were suddenly students and not office workers anymore. Once I'd twigged the various character occupations and environments, I found it a little less puzzling to follow what was going on but, honestly, no less penetrable in terms of what the heck was supposed to be unfolding in terms of story content here.

As far as the story goes, it seems to be a tale about people getting turned into ghosts after just having some contact with spirits. The internet is somehow a transmitter (or maybe not, I couldn’t figure it out) and this strange spate of ghostly manifestations seems to have been started by this truly confounding attempt at an origin tale which starts with this guy in a building somehow realising there's something wrong with the electrics? So he uses red sticky tape to seal the edges of all the electrical boxes in a wall but then the place gets demolished and so the electricity, or whatever the heck it is, is free to slowly infect the world.

So... yeah. Anyway, our two sets of main protagonists are slowly whittled down to one male in one group and one female in the other group, as their friends are methodically "ghosted" one by one until only they are left. And not only are they the only ones left in their respective groups within the story but also, when they look around them after a while, it seems they could be the only survivors of their immediate neighbourhood... possibly the world.  It's almost like Gojira (aka Godzilla) has been stomping around the country but without anyone seeing him and with no real signs of damage other than the black stain left in the wake of people as they suddenly turn into lonely ghosts. Hmmm... maybe there's a metaphor in there somewhere but I couldn't really be bothered to reflect on it by this point in the movie.

The way the film is put together is kind of a frustrating thing too. The director is, like many directors I've been looking at lately, kind of obsessed with sectioning off parts of the screen to highlight his performers. The way he tends to do it, at least in this movie, is to use overlapping bits of the natural environment, from the flattened viewpoint of the camera, to make squares and rectangles out of the intersections of both horizontal and vertical lines and then to keep his performers in either one place or moving between intersections... quite cleverly with regards to camera movement in some places.The sections where he does this are often quite densely layered too... absolute tangles of gazillions of areas crowded into a single frame on occasion. However, rather than go for the bright kind of colour scheme which would accentuate this in a clean manner, the colour palette looks rather dull for the most part and... well... the whole thing looked just a little grainy and dingy to me. Not what I’d expect to illustrate that kind of penchant for linear detail, for sure. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to look like this and it’s not just a bad transfer... this is Arrow, after all and, although it’s been seen that they are certainly not above making mistakes in some of their restorations, I would have thought that this kind of dulled down look must be a part of the director’s vision, in this instance.

Another thing which seemed a little out of kilter with the visuals was the score in some places, by composer Takefumi Haketa. Not in terms of the quality of the writing on it, by any means but, for some reason, it often kind of enters and exits a scene right in the middle without warning. It seems a little bizarrely spotted and I wonder how much of that process was decided by the composer and how much was messed around with at the editing stage. As I said, it probably wasn’t too bad in and of itself but the way in which it’s used in certain places just felt a little inappropriate to me, in all fairness.

And that’s all the time I’m going to waste on Pulse. I believe it’s regarded by many as something of a j-horror classic but I found that, for the most part, it did nothing much for me. The actors seemed good but the way their characters were written didn’t have me identifying with them, or really caring, truth be told. Not something I’d recommend as a starting point for this sub-genre of film and even fans of these kinds of movies will possibly not get too much out of it, I suspect. Not something I would find myself going back to anytime soon either, it’s safe to say. 

Crimson Peak

Redded Bliss

Crimson Peak
2015 USA
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Slight spoilers in this one 
in terms of the first half of the movie.

Well... this one surprised me by completely living up to my expectations of it... which were unrealistically high, it has to be said.

I first saw the trailer for Crimson Peak online, either at the end of 2014 or early 2015, if my memory is not playing tricks on me. I admire Guillermo del Toro as a director but find him a bit hit and miss when it comes to making movies which are able to entertain me. Films like Pan’s Labyrinth which, with its surrealistic fairytale leanings, should have been right up my street... left me a little cold, to be honest. Whereas stuff like the Hellboy movies (especially the second one) and Pacific Rim, to a certain extent  (reviewed by me here), are films I could happily repeat watch. However, even the films I find less than entertaining by him are always worth a look because they are usually so arresting at a visual level. Crimson Peak is no exception but, I’m happy to say, it’s also wildly entertaining and, frankly, a bit of a masterpiece of modern Gothic romance.

Now, I’m pretty sure I read a tweet by del Toro saying that the film is not a horror movie. Well, I guess it depends on your definition of horror. For me, anything with non-human monsters - be they off-planet, other-wordly or supernatural phenomena, falls firmly into the horror movie camp for me... and the presence of a handful of ghosts in this film certainly does the trick here. However, the horror details are really the icing on the cake of this delicious crimson confection... the movie is both more than that, and less than that, in equal parts... depending on your point of view.

More than that because they support what is basically a contemporary take on an old school gothic romance, a film firmly following a direct lineage of movie versions of such works as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca. Less, because the movie is more about the characters and their relation to their situation rather than a full on ghost movie... although this really isn’t to suggest the movie is anything less than scary in certain sections. What we have here is the style of those kinds of earlier literary works infused with a quite chilling rendition, due to del Toro’s very good taste at getting things to look and feel right, of the kind of modern incarnations of ghost horror movies such as Mama (reviewed here) and Dark Water.

The film follows a young lady called Edith Cushing, played by Mia Wasikowska, as she finds herself in an unlikely romantic entanglement with her former Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed here) co-star Tom Hiddleston as Thomas Sharpe and his sinister sister Lucille Sharpe, played by Jessica Chastain. After the violent murder of her rich father by an unseen assailant, she and her money return with the Sharpes to live with them in England, to his ancestral home which... as Edith finds out far too late (certainly much later than anyone in the audience would expect, given that Tom starts talking to her father and his colleagues about red clay)... is known by the locals under the nickname Crimson Peak. This is a place she has been warned of, by her dead mother, and told to stay away from... so obviously there wouldn’t be a story here unless she ended up at this place at some point in the film’s running time. Her biggest concern... and the audiences... is to try and figure out just who or what is there that may mean her harm. Is it the ghosts of the violently deceased that plague her in the night or are either Tom or Jessica less transparent in their intentions than they are letting on?

Well, I’ll tell you now you probably won’t take too much time seeing through the various clues, highlighted in the cinematic equivalent of a giant marker pen on paper... but the mystery element in the story should keep some people happy and it’s not the story, anyway, which makes this film such compelling viewing. It’s del Toro’s deft touch and signature on the frames themselves which will have you riveted to see what beautiful set piece is coming next. There is high romance (a lit candle for a waltz scene), lurking terror (the entire environment Edith ends up in) and there’s also the terrifyingly rendered ghosts in the movie... I promise you, you would not want to meet one of these creations on a dark night. Above all though, there’s also a deep and lacerating sense of violence which boils up when, admittedly, you most suspect it but... honestly... with a certain visceral force that leaves you with a schism in your head as you try to marry up the contrast between rich, romantic gothic atmosphere and the viciousness and goriness of an expression of violence in which del Toro certainly doesn’t pull any punches.

It’s a terrible cliché for me to write in a review but the film truly is a rich, visual and, also, aural feast - the sound design is beautiful with whispers of dread and terror lurking in your ears as you follow the characters through the old house on Crimson Peak. This is, of course, exactly what I would expect of the director and his artistic sensibilities. He has apparently gone on record as saying that the design of the film was his attempt to recreate the look of Mario Bava. Now, as regular readers will know, I cite Bava’s influence in films a lot but I wouldn’t have necessarily highlighted that here unless prompted by the director’s own words. What I will say is that I was much more struck by the film’s resemblance, on some visual level, to the mid 1950s to late 1960s horror movies put out by England’s Hammer studios. The dense colours don’t quite seem to be as luminous as one might expect to encounter in the works of Bava, to my mind, and more like what you would see in a Christopher Lee Dracula movie, for instance (my review of the first Hammer Dracula can be found here). Indeed, the fact that Mia Wasikowska’s main protagonist is presumably named after one of Hammer’s best loved actors, Peter Cushing, presumably demonstrates that these films were also in the director’s mind when he was working on this film.

Either way, Hammer and Bava are not the only references for horror or, indeed, giallo fans to sink their teeth into. For example, the murder of Edith’s father is straight out of a Dario Argento giallo... in fact, I suspect it’s inspired by a murder scene in Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red, reviewed by me here) but the director really manages to up the stakes and make the violence in this particular scene, among others, something you almost want to look away from. Which, frankly, is what violence should be... something you really want to look away from. The director uses the brutality of the violence to punctuate certain scenes, especially in the last reel, and really hits home that the characters populating the story, no matter how beautiful they all look in his perfect shot compositions and framed within his leisurely moving camera, are very much real people with a lot at risk. It helps add to the gravitas already conjured up by the three main leads and Charlie Hunnam’s character, who becomes more important toward the end. I’m happy to say that the ‘deus ex machina’ arc of Hunnam's character doesn’t necessarily follow the exact path the audience thinks it’s going to... and he's not very smart in some scenes, it has to be said.

Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is an absolutely beautiful film and it’s steeped in the gothic tradition of the literature of over a hundred years ago, filtered in a deliberately post-modern fashion through some of the best directors of colourful horror films of the past but, at no times, does it ever stop from being the unique and personal vision that you would expect from this Mexican master of cinema. Guillermo del Toro is one of the absolute key modern players of what is still the most popular art form of our time... the motion picture. Crimson Peak is, I will say again, a masterpiece and, from my view at this stage of his career, one of his key films.... certainly my favourite so far of all his works. Great beauty for fans of gothic romance and tales of ghostly spirits bearing warnings from the dead. Definitely one you should catch up with and see on a big screen. Such a beautiful film.

The New York Trilogy

Austerity Savings

The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
Penguin Classics ISBN: 0143039830

When an old friend of over 20 years, who lives in New York, noticed me tweeting last year that it’s been too long since I’d read Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, she sent me an absolutely beautiful paperback edition of said tome over to me for Christmas. Said edition has wonderfully illustrated covers, fashionably pseudo worn with grindhouse-poster style creases, including dust flaps and also “cover illustrations” of each of the three stories inside, all done by the remarkable comics guru Art Spiegelman, who is still, perhaps, best known for his graphic novel holocaust masterworks Maus and Maus 2 (where the Jewish people are drawn as mice and the Nazis drawn as cats). The pages are cut beautifully ragged at the edges (not smooth like a typical novel), which I love, and, to top it off, the inside bears an inscription made out to me from Paul Auster himself (my friend had been lucky enough to catch him for me at a reading). It was a thrilling Christmas present and I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get around in the “read me right now” queue.

Comprising three ‘stories’ - City Of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room - The New York Trilogy was a popular work when I was studying my graphic design degree at college over 20 years ago, which is probably the last time I read it. My memories of it were vague, although I remembered I’d liked it a great deal, but this is hardly that surprising. I’ve read a few of Auster’s works over the intervening years and a common trait in his work, at least the way I see it, is one of incomplete information, lack of any attempt at closure and an almost celebratory dwelling on a kind of spiritual ennui in his characters.

The way the short novellas which were later collected into this tome work together is very strange. There is an implication of connection between the stories which never really identifies itself. The character of Quinn, for example, who spends the majority of City Of Glass following a crazy, obsessed old man through the streets of New York, day in and day out, as he slowly realises that his wanderings are spelling out giant letterforms, is mentioned again in The Locked Room but, since the ending (if you want to call it that, since Auster’s endings never really seem to be anything other than a selection of ideas and questions) of City Of Glass leaves Quinn in a state where his involvement in the back story of The Locked Room seems all but impossible, one wonders in the end if this is the same Quinn or if there are a number of Quinn variations that could be equally as valid (or invalid) as others.

Similarly, when Quinn, who is a writer, is mistaken for somebody named Paul Auster and goes to meet the writer himself, one wonders if the Paul Auster that Quinn meets is the same Paul Auster who is writing the book you are reading, or if he is a totally fictional construct version of Auster. When the ‘narrator’ of The Locked Room suddenly starts talking in a more implicit way to the reader by specifically mentioning City Of Glass and Ghosts as experiments in writing, one wonders if the character narrator of the story is supposed to be Paul Auster and, if he is, is he the same Paul Auster who is a character in City Of Glass or is he a second fictional variant of Paul Auster... or is the writer perhaps writing as himself, which seems unlikely given the events described in the third story.

This kind of thing may drive some readers mad, I would imagine, as Auster doesn’t just break “the fourth wall”, but drives a truck through it repeatedly until the bricks and mortar are a fine, white powder blowing away in the wind. But it’s something I’ve always kind of liked about works of art myself.

There’s kind of an artificial frisson of possible relationships between the three segments set up by placing these three “stories” together and calling them a trilogy but, like other novels I’ve read by Auster, nothing really that you can quite put your finger on. And that almost seems to be the point in some ways. What the writer does is to leave the reader with a series of ideas and a number of questions which he then refuses to answer with any kind of clarity or satisfaction. Instead, we have a series of clues, or more properly, ideas of clues, dotted about the text as little chunks that can be latched onto but which won’t help the reader reach any set conclusion as to the fate or, indeed, purpose of any of the characters. Somewhat like real life in that respect.

For example, the fact that Quinn writes detective fiction under the name of Edgar Allan Poe’s literary creation William Wilson could be considered a sign post to something vital to the understanding of the text and the nature of the characters... or it might not. When the Peter Stillman that Quinn is following in City Of Glass suddenly becomes two Peter Stillmans and he follows one and not the other, is the other Peter Stillman the same as the Peter Stillman who turns up as an entirely, seemingly, different character in The Locked Room? One doesn’t know and Auster is certainly not going out of his way to give the reader any kid of explanation for his trouble. But then again, with such a fantastic set of... erm... set ups, would the reader really want to be spoon fed with cheap summations of one of several explanations and endings for these stories, or would the reader rather be left to be haunted with the endless possibilities of closure that may or may not arise from each of the parts that make up the whole of this novel? Paul Auster presumably favours the latter state of affairs and, as one of his readers, I have to say I don’t disagree with his decision.

The three stories kept me both fascinated and hungry for more revelations which would never come as I read further into the prose and it’s been a true pleasure to read this ‘mighty’ work of fiction once more. I’m going to have to plug back into Auster again sometime and catch up with his later work as it progresses. This one comes with a strong recommendation from me as long as you’re a reader who doesn’t mind not reading stories that have a beginning, a middle or an end... Auster tends to write about just the middles, I think, and leaves the rest for the reader to bring to the table. Film fans may also want to check out the brilliant movie Smoke, from 1995, which he wrote and which he also, uncredited, helped direct.