ANSWER KEY TO THE 2013 SLIFR HALLOWEEN HORROR FRAME-GRAB QUIZ (1931 - 2013)

 

And now, the answers you may not have been waiting for, the key to the 2013 SLIFR Halloween Classic Horror Frame-Grab Quiz. Most of those who took part and sent in answers got a goodly portion correct on the first pass, and then managed to figure out most of the rest on a piecemeal basis later. And some complained that, hey, it was just too damn hard this year. Ones that particularly perturbed even the most stalwart of contestants were numbers 10, 11, 23 and 29. Scroll down to scratch those persistent itches and any others that may still be bothering you. Hope you had a wonderfully warped and weird Halloween and that this quiz was at least a small part of your holiday enjoyment!

 

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CARRIED AWAY PART 2: THE HORROR DADS ON CARRIE'S ORIGINS, INFLUENCES AND LEGACY

 

 

With the evil influence (read: sugar buzz) now in the rear-view mirror, it’s time for the Horror Dads, those resident responsible/irresponsible monster-loving parental figures over at TCM’s Movie Morlocks, to continue and wrap up the discussion of Brian De Palma’s Carrie that began last week. Today the discussion ranges from the influences that might have been in the back of Stephen King’s mind as he wrote the book, and on De Palma’s as he orchestrated the movie adaptation, right up through Margaret White’s final repose and the movie’s famously terrifying conclusion. You can read part two right here, or scroll down to the post below to catch up on part one.

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CARRIED AWAY: THE HORROR DADS REVISIT BRIAN DE PALMA'S 1976 CLASSIC

Stephen King published his first novel, Carrie, in 1974, and by 1975 it seemed like everyone in my high school had a tattered copy of the paperback tucked in amongst the schoolbooks they carried from class to class. That’s when I finally picked it up, averse as I was to the possibility that anything that many people were all enthused about could be any good at all. But I, like everyone else I suppose, was captivated by the book’s simple premise— Carrie White, a 16-year-old misfit from an oppressively religious household where she lives with her fanatical mother, gets her first period in the gym shower and then gets another sort of shower—of abuse—when she reacts in ignorant horror over the bleeding. The incident leads to punishments, self-righteous anger, an increasing self-awareness of Carrie’s awakening telekinetic powers and a particularly nasty humiliation at the prom, where Carrie’s pent-up rage is unleashed on her victimizers, innocent bystanders, and eventually the entire town.

The story’s clever melding of straightforward, chronologically futuristic narrative (it’s set five years after the book’s date of publication, in 1979) with excerpts from newspaper accounts, first-person remembrances and sober, scholarly book-length summations, all drawing conclusions (and goosing that straightforward narrative) from a perspective even further down the temporal line, gave the read a strong sense of ghastly inevitability that kept me absorbed. But I remember thinking the conclusion, with Carrie walking home and consequently laying waste to the Maine town where she and so many others will live for only a short while longer, was excessive, and the fates King cooked up for her and her mother, the psychotic zealot Margaret White, were dramatically unsatisfying.

Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie, with Sissy Spacek  in the starring role in a screenplay adaptation by Lawrence D. Cohen (Ghost Story, It), necessarily jettisoned the novel’s specifically literary conceits and worked miracles with the emotional effectiveness of the ending that, at least in my eyes, eluded King. Carrie’s destructive charge is restricted to the havoc wreaked inside that fiery gymnasium—and the hell she raises for chief tormentor Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) and her slobbering boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta)—setting the stage for the real apocalypse, played out on the battlefield between freshly destroyed daughter and a mother who seeks to finish the job with a butcher knife in the name of Jesus. (In the book, Carrie uses her powers to stop Margaret’s heart; De Palma and Cohen cook up something altogether more outrageous, satisfying and, ultimately, devastating.)

My friends and I made a 200-mile round-trip pilgrimage to a nearby town to see Carrie back in the waning days of my senior year of high school in 1977, when the movie finally made it to our neck of the Southeastern Oregon desert. (It had already been scarring the general public for seven months by the time we got our chance to be traumatized.) I hadn’t yet gotten my whack at such seminal horror movies of my generation as The Exorcist or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so the movie seemed unlike anything I had yet seen in my young movie-going life—De Palma’s marvelous, iconoclastic technique, coupled with the movie’s social humor, sharp satire of religious mania (in which De Palma mixes Catholic imagery and Pentecostal fever with gleeful abandon) and extraordinary sense of both sympathy-- for Carrie-- and empathy-- for those around her, like Sue Snell and the doomed Tommy Ross, who try to do right by her-- made the film seem so startling and vivid as to be hyperreal, yet heightened and conducted like a sinister symphony with the most breathtaking gothic instrumentation.

The movie is nearly 37 years old, yet its shadow remains long and formidable. In 1988, with no actual movie sequel likely to carry on its filmed legacy (Carrie and her mom were dead at the end after all), Cohen adapted his own script into a notoriously short-lived Broadway musical. But even that disaster couldn’t snuff out interest in Carrie. De Palma’s movie finally got its official sequel in 1999-- The Rage: Carrie 2, which recycled Carrie’s basic revenge motifs (and a lot of footage from the original movie) into a generic story of date rape, harassment and revenge which was quickly, mercifully forgotten. The footsteps of the original movie were recycled into a 2002 TV-movie remake/series pilot which, fortunately, never caught on. And last year, there was even an off-Broadway revival of the ill-fated 1988 musical, which was granted a five-week run, considerably longer than the original’s infamous three-day collapse, before closing in the face of considerable cultural indifference.

And this past weekend the original movie was recycled yet again, this time by director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), from whom it was hoped a relevant post-Columbine, feminist/feminine sensibility toward this distinctly female tale of horror, which had never been told by a woman before, might emerge. Alas, Peirce’s Carrie feels like the indifferently assembled Lifetime Channel version of King’s bloody tragedy, complete with a tacked-on anti-bullying message to complete the movie’s dead-spin into redundancy. The new movie works from a script credited to Cohen (a formality no doubt made necessary by the degree of heavy lifting the new movie does from De Palma’s original) and augmented by Glee/American Horror Story scribe Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, whose contribution seems primarily implemented to sass up the dialogue—Billy Nolan utters that formidable modern screenwriting cliché "I got this!" not once, but twice—and bring the story kicking and screaming into the age of social networking by having Chris shoot video on her phone of Carrie’s menstrual breakdown and then posting it on YouTube, the natural legal consequences of which the movie simply shrugs off.

But the biggest shoes to fill turn out not to be Cohen’s or De Palma’s—Pierce and her writer go for King’s mass destruction but otherwise lift the entirety of the movie’s conclusion from De Palma, bereft of any of his customary wit, of course—but instead those occupied by Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, the 1976 film’s daughter-mother one-two punch. Chloe Moretz is miscast and struggles mightily to scrunch up her face and act with her nostrils to convey humiliation and, eventually, homicidal aggression, but she has no access to the wells of feeling Spacek conjures with such ease.

And where Piper Laurie’s Margaret was a grand opera classic of deep-chested, scripture-spouting domination masquerading as parental love, the self-hatred Julianne Moore brings to Margaret is much more on the surface. Margaret White v. 2013 is, among other things, a cutter slashing at her own thighs when things get especially tough, and much more of a garden-variety manipulator and pathetic, mewling head case than the character ever seemed on the page or in the 1976 incarnation. As Moore plays her, she seems more cowed than belligerent in the face of what Margaret sees as the demonic influences clutching for her daughter’s soul, and Peirce’s attempts to emphasize, despite her horrendous actions, that Margaret deep down really loves her daughter just come off as mealy and unconvincing attempts to "feminize" the character for the audience, to try and make it easier to endure the spiritual battery she inflicts on Carrie.

But enough about all that. In honor of the upcoming 40^th anniversary of the release of the book, and to capitalize on the renewed interest generated by the tepid new version, the Horror Dads—TCM’s Richard Harland Smith, along with writer-director Nicholas McCarthy (The Pact) and writers Paul Gaita, Jeff Allard, Greg Ferrara and myself-- have reconvened after a long absence (since last Halloween?) in order to throw some light and love on the 1976 version of Carrie. The conversation-- "We Were Kids-- The Horror Dads revisit Carrie (1976)"-- was so much fun and went to so many interesting and illuminating places that Richard, our esteemed editor, has split it into tantalizing halves. Part One posted today and will do lots to whet your appetite vis-à-vis revisiting the Brian De Palma movie, and Part Two will drop on November 1, All Saints’ Day, the perfect reading material for shaking off spooks and dealing with an intense session of high fructose corn syrup recovery.

It’s all Carrie all day today and the day after Halloween at TCM’S Movie Morlocks. Be sure to read it all too, because if you don’t, well, they’re all gonna laugh at you—laugh at you—laugh at you—

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SCAN THIS! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JIM EMERSON!

 

I started my adventures in blogging nine years ago, in November 2004, writing and doing my thing with no expectations that anyone other than very patient friends and family would ever read anything I posted. Then somewhere during those first few months the estimable Jim Emerson ran across the first of the SLIFR quizzes, wrote a glowing recommendation of it on his blog Scanners, and in the process kick-started a very happy time for me writing about an art form I loved and introducing me to a whole new world of people who loved it just as much as I did.

Jim and I quickly became friends even though, incredibly, we still have never been in the same room together at the same time, and he’s been a very generous supporter of my writing through the various joys and sorrows, enthusiasms and disagreements that watching movies closely over a lifetime will bring. (He *still* hasn’t seen the light on Speed Racer!) He’s a brilliant writer and film analyst and a very generous man whose influence I can feel every time I dare to try and put two words together. And if not for Jim and the curtain he lifted for me, I would not know many of the people who might be reading this right now.

It’s his birthday today, and I hope you will join me in raising a hearty (virtual) tankard of mead in his honor, wishing him the very best of days, today and every one that dawns after it, days full of love and happiness and, of course, movies to satisfy the mind and the soul.

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THE SLIFR FEARSOME HALLOWEEN CLASSIC HORROR FRAME-GRAB QUIZ (1931 – 2013)

‘Tis the season for some screamin’… and old dark houses, and knives flashing in the moonlight, and fangs… always fangs. Glad to have you back again for another round of the apparently now annual SLIFR Fearsome Halloween Classic Horror Frame Grab Quiz, in which we unveil 31 specially selected moments, one for each day of the month of Shocktober, culled from the vaults of the classic and not-so-classic and not-yet-classic horror movies we (or at least most of us) know and love.

This year’s selections, ranging from as far back as 1931 and as recently as last summer, often lean toward my tastes, naturally (there’s a general clue right there), but not always. And all the movies seen below are well known—no obscure direct-to-video titles from the bottom of the Netflix horror barrel are represented here—so anyone who knows her or his movie horrors ought not to have too tough a time shuffling through this particular graveyard.

All you need do, Dear Reader, is identify, by any means available, the movie from which each image comes. A couple of them are relative gimmes, a few others may be on the Abby Normal side, but the general range of the movies referenced is definitely in the mainstream. And none of them have simply been pilfered from the Internet, which might make them a little more difficult to trace. When you’ve come up with your answers, just tally up your score—we’re on the honor system here, but the wrath of Pazuzu awaits those who decide to cheat the system—and leave your score along with your name, either here in the comments section or under this post on my Facebook page. If you decide to post actual answers here rather than just scores, I’ll hold on to them until after Halloween so that the challenge will remain fresh for everyone who wants to dive in. Then, on November 1, I’ll announce the winner (last year’s champ, Roderick Heath, is still flush from the excitement of the honor and may not relinquish his crown without a fight) and a key to all 31 movie titles.

Oh, and be sure to click on the image if you need a bigger, better, clearer look. And now, consider the crypt open for business. May you return safely, and alive… and sane…

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Thanks for playing! And happy Halloween!

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MODERN ART LESSONS: TIM'S VERMEER

 

"There’s also this modern idea that art and technology must never meet. You go to school for technology or you go to school for art, but never for both. But in the Golden Age, they were one and the same person." -- Tim Jenison, inventor

Tim’s Vermeer, a good-humored inquiry into the mysteries of what constitutes the artistic process, traces the initially casual obsession of Tim Jenison, an engineer and inventor (he created the Video Toaster among many other video-oriented innovations), with the work of 17^th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Inspired by British artist David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge, which suggested that the sudden shift in painting from more stylized representation to the hyperrealism of masters like Vermeer, Caravaggio and others was enabled by the use of lenses and other complex systems of optics which these painters used to create their astonishingly detailed works, Jenison seizes on the notion of Vermeer’s near-photographic level of representation and begins to scratch an itch it will take five years to satisfy.

 

The inventor postulates that Vermeer in particular may have utilized a room-sized camera obscura which allowed him to precisely match the tones of objects and gradations of light and create his almost photorealistic canvases. At which point Jenison begins to wonder-- if the process of creation is as objective as all that, then he ought to be able to do what Vermeer did, with comparable results, essentially asking the question, does it take an artist to create art?
 

 

So Jenison embarks on his quest to recreate Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and perhaps answer that question. It turns out to be a grueling, exhilarating process dependent on equal parts creativity and technical imagination which finds him not only grinding his own lenses for his own camera obscura ("I couldn’t use a modern lens—they’re too good") and making his own paint, but even building his own version of the furniture in Vermeer’s masterpiece, essentially recreating the room the artist first composed and saw in order that it might be recreated yet again.

The movie emerges as a fascinating examination of the methods of one artist, whose life remains shrouded in if not exactly mystery, then certainly beneath a dearth of documentation-- Paintings are documents that can be read like text, we are reminded more than once-- who reaches out through his work to inform the nascent consciousness of a different sort of artist from an entirely different age. But given that Tim’s Vermeer is directed, deftly, by Teller, with suitably impressed on-and-off-screen narration from Penn Jillette, it shouldn’t be surprising that the documentary also plays on the same level which much of Penn and Teller’s work as postmodern illusionists does—as an elaborate deconstruction of a master magician’s trick.

The questions which are raised by that deconstruction, including whether or not Jenison’s methods are a plausible explanation for Vermeer’s achievements, serve to undermine conventional notions of what separates the artist from the technician, as well as to how much mystery surrounding an artist’s methodology is central to the elevation of their work into the realm of art. But there’s also a disturbing side effect at play here, one openly acknowledged by both Hockney and Jenison-- Does the proof of the duplicator’s success, the sense that any old technical genius with a mirror and a paintbrush can recreate the conditions and the result of the master artist’s toiling, inadvertently devalue the genuine inspiration of a Johannes Vermeer? It’s a question the movie is honorably content to leave us chewing on over the end credits, buoyant on the swell of emotion inspired by an impossible job well done.
 

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Tim's Vermeer had its U.S. premiere on October 3 at the New York Film Festival and will be released later this year by Sony Pictures Classics.

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