The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been).

Project:  Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been)

Tracklist and Introduction

01. Somewhat Damaged
02. The Day the World Went Away
03. The Frail
04. The Wretched
05. Missing Places
06. We're in This Together
07. The Fragile
08. Just Like You Imagined
09. The Great Collapse
10. The March
11. Even Deeper
12. Pilgrimage
13. One Way to Get There
14. No, You Don't
15. Taken
16. La Mer
17. Adrift and at Peace
18. The Great Below
19. Not What It Seems Like
20. White Mask
21. The New Flesh
22. The Way out Is Through
23. Into the Void
24. Where Is Everybody?
25. The Mark Has Been Made
26. 10 Miles High
27. Was It Worth It?
28. Things Falling Apart
29. Please (+ Appendage)
30. Can I Stay Here?
31. Feeders
32. Starfuckers, Inc.
33. Complication
34. Claustrophobia Machine (Raw)
35. Last Heard From
36. I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
37. And All That Could Have Been
38. The Big Come Down
39. Underneath It All
40. Ripe [with Decay]

Runtime: 2h44m13s

Expanding on the original release of Nine Inch Nails' 1999 masterpiece The Fragile, this collection has been titled The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been), henceforth referred to by the acronym TFAATCHB.

History

The Fragile - CD and Vinyl cover.

When The Fragile was released on September 21, 1999, its CD tracklist ran for 103 minutes and 37 seconds, or 1 hour, 43 minutes and 37 seconds, split onto two discs.  It featured the following 23 songs.

Disc 1 (Left)
01. Somewhat Damaged
02. The Day the World Went Away
03. The Frail
04. The Wretched
05. We're in This Together
06. The Fragile
07. Just Like You Imagined
08. Even Deeper
09. Pilgrimage
10. No, You Don't
11. La Mer
12. The Great Below

Disc 2 (Right)
01. The Way out Is Through
02. Into the Void
03. Where Is Everybody?
04. The Mark Has Been Made
05. Please
06. Starfuckers, Inc.
07. Complication
08. I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
09. The Big Come Down
10. Underneath It All
11. Ripe (with Decay)

The cassette version of The Fragile added on a remix/epilogue to "Please" called "Appendage" to even out the runtime on each side of the second cassette.  The vinyl version of the album, on the other hand, left "Appendage" off its tracklist but featured two bonus tracks, "10 Miles High" and "The New Flesh," on the second half of the album.  These bonus songs were seamlessly mixed into the album following "The Mark Has Been Made" and "Complication," respectively.  Oddly enough, the vinyl version of "Ripe" cuts off the last minute or so of the song, ending before the "Decay" section included on the CD and cassette releases.

Between these three formats, the complete experience of officially released material for The Fragile wasn't the 23-song version on the CD but the 25.5 songs attainable by adding the bonus material from the cassette and vinyl releases into a new playlist at their appropriate times in accordance with their releases.

Things Falling Apart

In 2000, Nine Inch Nails released a remix CD for The Fragile called Things Falling Apart.  Leading up to its release, a website of the same name launched with small videos and music clips of material from the era, including a 65-second untitled segue song that has not been released before or since.  The release of Things Falling Apart featured an original composition called "The Great Collapse" that was intended for The Fragile but cut from its final release.  Often repeating "The Wretched" chorus lyrics of "Now you know this is what it feels like," many fans brushed the song aside as a remix.  This raised the amount of Fragile-era material by another song and a half.

Two years later, before NIN mastermind Trent Reznor put his career on hiatus to go to rehab for cocaine and alcohol, Nine Inch Nails released a live album called And All That Could Have Been with a limited edition companion EP called Still.  Boasting nine songs, Still featured four quieted versions of classic NIN favorites and five new compositions.  Among the five new songs were "Adrift and at Peace" and the title track "And All That Could Have Been."  Reznor has since confirmed that "Adrift and at Peace" was at one time considered an outro or ending piece for "La Mer" from the original release of The Fragile.  Likewise, a brief breakdown between the first two verses of "And All That Could Have Been" features the same chord progression as the crescendo of The Fragile's Disc 1 closing song "The Great Below," confirming its at-one-time intended use on the album.  Nine Inch Nails frequently use leitmotifs and recurring lyrical and musical themes throughout multiple songs across an album (see the chorus of "Heresy," piano outro of "Closer" and acoustic guitar of "The Downward Spiral" on 1994's The Downward Spiral), and 'The Fragile' is no different ("La Mer" shares chord progressions

Still.

with "Into the Void" and "The Frail" is a piano version of the guitar solo from "The Fragile").

The three remaining new tracks from 2002's Still have unconfirmed origins, though Trent Reznor has stated that "some" of the new songs were composed for his unused score of Mark Romanek's film One Hour Photo.  Since I can't verify any of those songs' intentions for The Fragile, those three were left alone while the other two ("Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been") add to the increasing list of songs we can confirm as having some kind of home in the original The Fragile recording sessions.

To recap, by this time, bonus material on top of the main CD release of The Fragile includes the vinyl bonus tracks "10 Miles High" and "The New Flesh," the cassette remix epilogue "Appendage," the untitled song from ThingsFallingApart.com, "The Great Collapse" from the remix album Things Falling Apart and the two clearly-related songs from Still - "Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been."

Fast forward 13 years.  In 2015, following five subsequent Nine Inch Nails LP's, Trent Reznor began working with Dr. Dre and Apple to launch Apple Music.  To promote the launch of the program, Reznor released instrumental versions of Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile and With Teeth.  The Fragile (Instrumental), a collection of wordless versions of the original 23 commercially-released Fragile songs, even boasted alternate versions of some of its already-instrumental songs and three MORE bonus songs from the recording sessions.  These songs were titled "The March," "Can I Stay Here?" and "Hello, Everything Is Not OK."  "Hello, Everything Is Not OK" shares a chorus with "10 Miles High" and is believed to be an alternate, early or demo version of the latter.  "Can I Stay Here?" is previously unheard and "The March" was taken from the vaults and reworked into the Reznor-produced "Skin of a Drum" by Saul Williams in 2007 - it's been confirmed in interviews that some of the old The Fragile leftovers were used for Williams's album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which not only features "Skin of a Drum" but is entirely produced by Reznor.

Finally, around this time, Reznor teased "new NIN in 2016" though nothing was heard from the band again until December 2016 when they announced a new EP and "definitive versions" of most of their previous records, remastered on vinyl.  Included in this new catalogue was not only The Fragile but a new, expanded take on the record, called The Fragile (Deviations 1).  This four-LP set contains all the Apple Music instrumentals (and its bonus tracks) as well as nine ADDITIONAL songs and bits from the 1997-1999 Fragile recording sessions.

It was at this point in time it occurred to me that the world finally had as exhaustive and complete of an allocation of material from Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile sessions as it was going to get.  The only problem was that it was spread across a half dozen releases, some of which had gone out of production up to 16 years before (more on that later), and the most comprehensive version (Deviations 1) didn't have any of the lyrics.

The Curation Process

The Fragile (Deviations 1)

Inspired by the blog Albums That Never Were, I decided to finally make some kind of ultimate/comprehensive/director's cut of The Fragile, maintaining as much integrity of the official releases and taking as few liberties with them as was humanly possible.  The added complication with The Fragile is Reznor's tendency to run one song into another seamlessly, without a moment of silence in which one could insert bonus material.  In addition, the places in which he *had* split up previously-conjoined songs to add new tracks were only on the instrumental versions of the album; the original releases with vocals didn't have the new clean breaks between tracks.

My framework was to start with the Deviations 1 and Apple Music instrumentals sequencing, restore as much of them with the original 1999 CD release as possible, fill in the bonus tracks where I had clues (e.g. the vinyl bonus songs, patterns of leitmotifs and interviews with Trent about song placement) and then add the rest wherever it felt right.  As a lifelong fan of Nine Inch Nails, I felt a real obligation to the project.

The actual tracklist for Deviations 1 (if we don't yet differentiate between instrumental vs. vocal versions) is nearly identical to the tracklist for 'TFAATCHB' with the following exceptions.

1) "The Great Collapse," "Adrift and at Peace," "And All That Could Have Been" and "Things Falling Apart" (which is what I've named the untitled segue from ThingsFallingApart.com) do not appear on Deviations 1.  At least the first three are completed and officially-released songs from The Fragile recording sessions so I felt they belong.  The unofficially titled "Things Falling Apart" is the only remaining audio heard from these sessions with no other releases.

2) On Deviations 1, "Feeders" is preceded by "10 Miles High (Instrumental)" which is actually "Hello, Everything Is Not OK" from the Apple Music instrumentals.  I replaced "Hello..." with the original "10 Miles High" and moved it to its spot on the vinyl release (after "The Mark Has Been Made").  I felt that having both would be redundant, and "10 Miles High" sounds more polished, final and in-line with the official 1999 releases than "Hello..." does.

3) On Deviations 1, "Please" and "Appendage" are split into two separate tracks.  I rejoined them to honor the spirit of the 1999 cassette release, which lists them as "Please (+ Appendage)" rather than

The Fragile - cassette.

as two separate songs.  "Appendage" even starts in time with the end of "Please" after a couple silent beats and is clearly an epilogue meant to be attached to it.

My reasons for placing the four songs not included in Deviations 1 where I did are as follows.  The first two listed below felt like they'd appear on the first disc of the 1999 CD release; the last two just felt like disc 2 material.  Now for each song individually.  "The Great Collapse" shares its only lyrics with "The Wretched," as I've said.  Also, much like "The Frail" is like a reprise of "The Fragile," I can't deny the simpler nature of "The Great Collapse" in comparison with its lyrical counterpart.  I feel that they're linked.  Also, on the original 1999 releases of The Fragile, I happened to notice that most of the related songs ("The Frail" and "The Fragile," "La Mer" and "Into the Void," etc) were three or four tracks apart, so I stuck "The Great Collapse" four songs after "The Wretched"'s place on the 1999 release.  I think the other two pairings and this one are clever ways to take a breather and recall or anticipate a musical or lyrical theme.  "Adrift and at Peace" was a no-brainer, since, as I mentioned earlier, Trent has stated that it's essentially a closing piece for "La Mer."  The difficult part was separating "La Mer" from "The Great Below," which I did by cutting off the post-vocal section of the 1999 release of the song and replacing it with the Deviations 1 version, which ends without mingling with "The Great Below."  I then cut off the slow fade-in/intro at the beginning of "Adrift and at Peace" as well as "La Mer"'s overlap with "The Great Below" and fused them together for a surprising but nonstop flow between the two tracks similar to how "Missing Places" on Deviations 1 ends and "We're in This Together" begins after an excised intro.

"Things Falling Apart" was a little 65-second segue and it just felt right to put it before "Please," since Trent had already separated the vinyl edition's "10 Miles High -> Please" with the new "Was It Worth It?" on Deviations 1.  The song "And All That Could Have Been," on the other hand, has always, always struck me as a continuation of "I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally," despite sharing some chords with "The Great Below."  In both "And All That Could Have Been" and "I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally," the protagonist of the story dwells broken-hearted on loss, specifically involving some kind of relationship, using winter imagery (frost, snow, freezing, ice) to express his lamentations.  Something in my gut told me to put them together as a slow reaction to the album's preceding events before the final descent of the last three songs on the album.  I was able to sew them together by giving "Complication" its independence with a Deviations 1 ending, then after the new songs, using the longer intro to "I'm Looking Forward..." from Deviations 1 and sneaking it onto the beginning of the 1999 CD release.  At the end of "I'm Looking Forward," I took the 20-second rain-and-synth intro for "And All That Could Have Been" as it appeared on Still and I did a very short fade-in to help it stand alone.  I then took it and overlapped its first 10 seconds with the last 10 seconds of "I'm Looking Forward" so the two flow seamlessly.

In any other place in which a song from the original release was tied to its successor but I needed to separate them to fit bonus tracks in, I used similar tricks taking the intros/outros from 2016's Deviations 1 and replacing the problematic segues.  Sometimes I broke songs apart (e.g. "The Wretched" and "We're in This Together") and other times I rejoined them ("The Mark Has Been Made" and "10 Miles High"), in accordance with getting every song flowing smoothly with as few breaks as possible.

The final runtime for TFAATCHB is 164m13s, or 2 hours, 44 minutes and 13 seconds.  This is longer than the original CD release by just over a full hour.  It boasts 40 songs compared to the CD's 23 and culls material from seven separate audio sources.  From the time I envisioned this project in high school (when the multiple versions of The Fragile were released on 9/21/99) to its final completion, it spanned 17 years, three months and eight days.

Sources

All 23 songs from the original 1999 CD release of The Fragile represent their place in this mix, except for "We're in This Together" and the intro/outro exceptions noted above.

All bonus materials which appeared first on the Apple Music instrumentals and subsequently on Deviations 1 are taken directly from a high-quality digital download of The Fragile (Deviations 1) from store.nin.com.  This includes "Missing Places," "The March," "One Way to Get There," "Taken," "Not What It Seems Like," "White Mask," "Was It Worth It?," "Can I Stay Here?," "Feeders," "Claustrophobia Machine (Raw)" and "Last Heard From."

We're in This Together (Pt. 1) CD single.

"We're in This Together," "10 Miles High" and "The New Flesh" are taken from the out-of-print CD single We're in This Together (Pt. 1).

"The Great Collapse" is from a CD copy of the 2000 remix album Things Falling Apart.

"Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been" are taken from a CD copy of Still as it appeared in the deluxe edition of the 2002 live CD release And All That Could Have Been.

"Things Falling Apart" is taken from an mp3 of a web rip from ThingsFallingApart.com.

"Appendage" is taken from a high-quality mp3 import of the original cassette release of The Fragile.

Quality

Every assurance was made to achieve the highest possible sound quality.  Regarding the above-listed sources, the original release of The Fragile as well as the CD's We're in This Together (Pt. 1), Still and Things Falling Apart were ripped on a MacBook in iTunes (from their commercially-bought physical editions) as 44.1khz WAV files.  The Deviations 1 bonus songs are all downloaded WAV files of equal or higher quality directly from the digital purchase of The Fragile (Deviations 1) on store.nin.com.  Only "Things Falling Apart" and "Appendage" arrive as-is from their original mp3 sources.

Any required editing was done in WavePad Sound Editor.  Every finalized WAV file has also been copied and converted to a 320kbps CBR mp3 in Switch Sound File Converter for ease of use, although the original WAV files remain uncompressed for purposes of continuous/gapless playback.

Disc Breaks

Disc 1:  Tracks 01-12
Disc 2:  Tracks 13-27
Disc 3:  Tracks 28-40

Availability, Ethics and Random Thoughts

For obvious legal reasons, I can neither give nor sell The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been) to you no matter how nicely you ask or how much you offer me.  It's also a matter of supporting the artist; these songs are all worth owning.  I legally own purchased copies of every song on here aside from the website rip of the untitled song I'm calling "Things Falling Apart."  Even "Appendage," which I'll admit I downloaded for this - I own my cassette copy of The Fragile but never figured out how to hook up my cassette player to a computer and record a good-quality version of the track.  So instead of sharing this with you, I'd encourage you to purchase a CD copy of the original 1999 release and track down as many of the other songs as you legally can and curate your own personal version of this sprawling epic for home use.  Curating extended album mixes is actually a lot of fun.  Sure there are reasons some of these songs weren't included on the original commercial releases, but nobody's telling you to burn your old copies and only listen to a personalized mix instead.  I've also fleshed out versions of Radiohead's The King of Limbs and Kid A/mnesiac and I'm proud of those too.  We're fortunate to live in an age where we can customize our own music and make albums into personal experiences again.

That brings me to my next point.  I'm sure that plenty of people (read: imaginary) will ask "Why didn't you include (insert other Nine Inch Nails song from 1997-2000 here) on this?  You suck!"  Well, several years ago I saw someone had really gone "kitchen sink" on The Fragile and made a mix that included something like every new piece from Still, a couple remixes from Things Falling Apart, "Deep" (from the Tomb Raider soundtrack), and all of Trent and Co.'s contributions to the Lost Highway soundtrack.  It may be longer, and it may work for them, but to me it was more of an endurance test of that entire half-decade, losing the focus of the original record in favor of just "having more."  More power to the person who made it, but that's not for me.  I forced myself to only include songs that I knew were written and recorded for the purpose of inclusion on The Fragile (whether they made the 1999 cut or not), which was difficult because the remaining Still pieces are gorgeous.  

Anyway, I digress.  Thanks for reading; this was incredibly fun and I'll soon be thinking about what to do next.

Marriage Equality.

Last year for Pride Month I wrote a blog outlining my thoughts on equal/civil rights for LGBT's and was honored that it received several hundred views (106 just this past Tuesday!).  This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a vote of five to four that the institution of marriage legally extended to include same-sex couples, so I decided to speak up once more as a straight ally and advocate for equal rights for those who identify as non-heterosexuals.  Hear me out; it takes a minute to get there.

I got married nearly six years ago to an amazing woman.  In my own opinion or experience, marriage begins with that proposal, and the outside chance you'll get rejected slingshots into the joy of engagement so fast it made me dizzy.  Suddenly my world was ready to change for the better: I'd proposed that Kristy and I live our lives together, joining as one into something greater than ourselves.  We celebrated with family and friends and then started planning one of those "wedding" things you hear about.  I started planning it a few months later, once we'd gotten our announcements and engagement party taken care of; my wife started planning in the car on the way home from where I proposed (a hibachi restaurant in Newnan, Georgia).  We figured things out systematically, which was fun for the most part.  Our venue (the Ritz-Carlton at Amelia Island, Florida) was fantastic in walking us through everything step-by-step, using a coordinator and inviting us to a menu tasting to decide on food (filet and crab cakes, which rocked).

Now, there's a point at which someone receiving your money for some component of the wedding will ask you a question.  This question makes you realize just how absurd all the details are.  It's the reason people elope.  You'll have made, roughly, 150 or so decisions regarding "your special day" with no end in sight and some doe-eyed human will look you in the eye and need your opinion on something, and you will just snap.  It's a different question for all of us.  My Best Man, who just got married a couple months ago, never wants to hear the word "boutonniere" again as long as he lives.  My brain completely shut down when our wedding planner's assistant presented me with the options for napkin folds at the reception tables.

"If you want them on the tables, not in the wine glasses, they can be French Pleat or Single Fold."

"I'm...What?"

"Or if you'd prefer to have the napkins inside the wine glasses, which is the case for most weddings, we could do Flame Fold, Lilly Fold or Candle Fan Fold."

"I'm gonna be honest with you; I appreciate everything you're doing for me but I really don't know that I can convince myself that this will have any bearing on either of our lives."

"Well, there's also Crown Fold, Diamond Fold..."

"I don't...We're looking at napkins."

"Yes sir."

"Okay.  Ask Kristy."

But it got settled, and we ended up throwing ourselves the best party of our lives.  I had my grandparents talking to my college roommates, a young cousin being a junior bridesmaid and we picked out so much sweet music to play that people still ask me for our playlist/soundtrack.  We were married out back of the hotel, near the beach, and dozens of people sat on their hotel room balconies watching the ceremony and applauding for us when it was over.  At my wife's request, I wrote not only both our vows but the whole ceremony.  We hired a photojournalist I know to shoot the wedding and our pictures are fantastic.  The entire thing was the most fun I think I've ever had.

And I feel so wistful and dreamy looking back on it, I can't begin to reconcile that kind of unadulterated joy with someone like Rick Scarborough, who claimed this week he would light himself on fire if two men or two women were allowed to experience the same happiness in a lawful marriage.  By using such a dramatic example, Scarborough loosely implies a likeness between himself and Bồ Tát Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who, in 1963, self-immolated as protest against Ngo Dinh Diem - a tyrant in Vietnam who made Buddhism all but illegal.  Thích Quảng Đức's public suicide shocked the world, catalyzing a coup and assassination of Diem.  For people like Scarborough (or Nick and Sarah Jensen, an Australian couple who vowed to divorce if marriage equality is passed by Aussie parliament), the unquenchable thirst to be martyred for their religious beliefs betrays Thích Quảng Đức's self-sacrifice.  It instead reminds one of the child threatening to hold his/her breath to a point of passing out unless Mommy or Daddy buys the child a new toy - an immature and morally reprehensible threat that sullies the ideas of the sanctity of life and marriage, respectively, just as much as those against whom they rally, if not more so.

Most religious people I know (including that wife of mine) are incredibly peaceable, live-and-let-live types.  Unfortunately, detractors of marriage equality almost exclusively try to use religion as the shield for their opinions.  It usually goes along these lines:  We're told by this small but vocal portion of the population that United States law is founded on Christian principles.  John Adams, on the other hand, is quoted as saying "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."  Thomas Jefferson agreed - "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the Common Law [of England, to which legal matters not covered by the Constitution defer]."  I've also been told that the Founding Fathers would've wished Christian law to reign over the entire American populace, to which Thomas Jefferson also said "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  In response to that, we're often told that The Bible forbids homosexuality (and The Word of God never changes); meanwhile we're absolved of other practices forbidden in The Bible (e.g. eating shellfish, mixing fabrics) because The Word of God does change.  The last point of discussion is that legalizing something forbidden in The Bible inflicts upon "religious freedoms."  Around this time, someone usually asks "Why isn't eating pork made illegal, to guarantee the same 'religious freedom' to Muslims?" and we're back to square one: because United States law is founded on Christian principles.  I've seen this train circle this track for hours on end.

The Supreme Court was established in Article III of The Constitution of the United States of America as the highest possible court of law to which any legal case could appeal.  Meant to be absolutely impartial to cases, their jurisdiction covers Constitutional Law, controversies involving matters between more than one state and so on.  Now, marriage can be seen as a complex legal contract since the Constitution doesn't explicitly define marriage but Former President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, restricting it to be a union between one man and one woman.  Clinton later decided he'd made a mistake and advocated for its repeal with support from President Obama, who declared in 2011 that parts of DoMA were unconstitutional and would no longer be an admissible defense in court.

So when the vote came in today, the four justices who sided against marriage equality were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia and John G. Roberts Jr.  Their dissent from their colleagues' decision is as interesting as the judiciary gets:  Justice Thomas, an African-American judge, is married to a white woman, which would've been illegal if not for the Supreme Court's ruling of Loving V. Virginia in 1967 in favor of interracial marriage.  Many have been calling for him to abstain from voting on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act since 2011, when his wife Virginia Thomas was revealed to have supported a conservative lobbyists' group that rallied for the repeal of the health insurance law.  He voted against the ACA this week, but it was carried through anyway.

Justice Alito was appointed on Halloween of 2005 by Former President George W. Bush as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor.  His vote comes as less of a surprise, arising several years after attacking a school's anti-harassment policy - arguing that derogatory statements against gays is part of free speech.  Justice Scalia, alongside Justices Thomas and Alito, is the third of four Supreme Court judges who dissented from the ruling.  He's also the third of them to attend fundraisers supporting the Federalist Society, a conservative special interest group who were investigated less than 10 years ago for their influence over the Justice Department and over a half-dozen firings made by that office.

So, by the thinnest of SCOTUS margins, amid threats of suicide and divorce and accusations that marriage equality is the beginning of a holocaust against Christians - and waiting mere decades for the legal right - two members of the same sex can finally join together in a personal rite/institution that most of us have taken for granted our whole lives.

Better late than never.

Christmas Movies that Don't Suck.

So you’ve seen Tiny Tim say “God bless us, everyone” so often you’ve turned Satanist.  You know the exact number of times that Joe Pesci would’ve died in real life from Kevin McAllister’s torture in the first two Home Alone movies, and every time a bell rings all you get is annoyed.  Believe me, I’m with you.  If you’re like me and just can’t take seeing a young Natalie Wood pull Kris Kringle’s whiskers again, here are some alternatives to cure that Christmas Movie Fatigue.

The Ref (1994) - Denis Leary – angry, loud, fast-talking Denis Leary before the Ice Age films – stars in this black comedy about a very dysfunctional family in the suburbs (including Kevin Spacey and Christine Baranski) being taken hostage by a jewel thief on Christmas Eve.  In 93 minutes it manages to poke fun at suburbia, entitled teens, local law enforcement, high-maintenance mothers-in-law and marriage.  If you’ve ever wanted to tell a loved one’s parent “I know loan sharks that are more forgiving than you,” this is one to watch.

Scrooged (1988) - Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a mean-spirited but highly successful network executive, happy to make others miserable until his old business associate comes back from the grave to warn him of visits by three ghosts to help him see the wrong of his ways.  Sound familiar?  It’s because Scrooged is a (very refreshing) update of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  He’s supported by an all-star cast, including Karen Allen, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum and Bobcat Goldthwait.  Clearly a comedy cast, director Richard Donner (The Goonies, Lethal Weapon) delivers a hilarious look at a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge that manages one of the best closing monologues in film history.

Trading Places (1983) - Wall Street milquetoast Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) and con man Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) are the unwitting pawns in a life-switching experiment by Winthorpe’s multimillionaire bosses, the Duke Brothers.  Just in time for Christmas, Winthorpe finds himself on the streets, framed for drug dealing, penniless and befriended only by a prostitute (Jamie Lee Curtis) while Valentine suddenly lives the high life with a private chef and chauffeur.  Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy are at the top of their game, working adult humor into this dark comedy directed by John Landis (Animal House, The Blues Brothers).

Bad Santa (2003) - “If I’d have known this is how my life would turn out, I would have killed myself a long time ago.  Come to think of it I still might.”  In this pitch-black comedy from director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World), Billy Bob Thornton is a robber posing as a mall Santa.  Together with his elf (Tony Cox, Oz: The Great and Powerful), each year they work a new mall, entertaining kids by day and casing the joint by night.  Thornton’s addictions to booze and sex occasionally get in the way of him mooching food and shelter off a lonely bullied child, but the kid brings out some Christmas goodness in him and his girlfriend, a bartender with a Santa sex fetish.  This is likely not one for the kiddies.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) - Tim Burton and director Henry Selick bring this stop-motion classic to life with songs by Danny Elfman.  Jack Skellington is the de facto leader of Halloweentown, scaring kids worldwide, but he’s grown bored with his repetitive task and tries to bring Christmas to his spooky village instead.  Beautiful for its entire 76-minute run, it works great for kids, with themes about trying to be something you aren’t and learning to embrace yourself for who you are.  Selick went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, while his animation studio also created Paranorman and The Boxtrolls.

Love Actually (2003) - A romantic comedy?  Really?  Yes, really.  I was a real naysayer on this until I agreed to watch it, and now I’m converted.  An ensemble cast including Liam Neeson, Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, Colin Firth and Keira Knightley lead this series of interwoven stories of romance, drama and humor in England on the week of Christmas.  On the funny side of things, a bachelor decides to book a plane ticket to America based solely on the presumption that American women love a British accent; an aging and jaded rock star (Bill Nighy) stuck in the machine of the celebrity industry takes outrageous steps to stay relevant in an age obsessed with boy bands (“Don’t buy drugs, kids…become a rock star and people will give them to you for free!”); a male and female body double for adult movies meet and make shy small talk while in the most suggestive poses/actions.  At the same time, a middle-aged man (Alan Rickman, Harry Potter) has trouble staying with his prickly wife (Emma Thompson) when a young co-worker expresses her feelings for him; a new bride (Keira Knightley) discovers that her new husband’s best friend (The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln) is in love with her and it may cost him his friendship with the couple.  Love Actually is a bit cutesy at times, but a pretty tight movie.

A Christmas Story (1983) - An official Red Ryder carbine-action two-hundred shot range model air rifle.  This is all that Ralph Parker, a nine-year-old boy, wants for Christmas: a BB gun.  Non-fiction writer Jean Shepherd (who also narrates the film) brings us this amazing holiday story in the vein of NPR’s This American Life.  Ralph is a kid in the Midwest growing up post-World War II and this film runs him through the gauntlet of experiences that childhood and Christmas are made of.  A mouthful of soap for cursing, mom bundling her kids up in too many layers, seeing someone get their tongue stuck to a frozen pole on a dare, hideous homemade Christmas outfits from a crazy relative – it’s all in there.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) - Only a little gentler than The Ref, the original National Lampoon movies starred Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo as Clark and Ellen Griswold, a slightly dysfunctional Chicagoland couple with a son and daughter.  In Christmas Vacation, Clark deals with hosting his parents, in-laws, brother’s family and uncle for the holidays.  Of course nobody appreciates Clark slowly losing it while desperately clinging to Christmas traditions, leading to some pretty crazy moments.  Aside from the 60-second insult Clark spins at his boss at the end of the movie (If you don’t YouTube it, you’re basically a bad human being), there are scenes like Clark’s senile aunt being asked to say the blessing over their dinner and in return reciting the pledge of allegiance.

Elf (2003) - Elf is a Will Ferrell movie for people who don’t like Will Ferrell.  Ferrell is at his best as Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole.  Bob Newhart plays his adoptive elf father, while James Caan is his real father, Ed Asner is Santa Claus and Zooey Deschanel is Ferrell’s love interest.  Buddy learns he’s a human – and not just an elf twice the size of all his friends – in his thirties and goes to find his real father, a cranky children’s book publisher.  Jon Favreau directs while Buddy learns to be a person, often the hard way – including getting in a fistfight with a mall Santa for calling him out on not being the real Santa (“You sit on a throne of lies!”).  Seeing Peter Dinklage beat Buddy up for calling Dinklage an elf is worth the price of admission on its own.

Pride.

June is LGBT Pride Month, in anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village starting June 28, 1969.  If we're going to talk about this, I'd like to get myself out of the way first.  I support marriage equality.  I support equal rights for the LGBT community.  I've heard the phrase "straight ally" tossed around to represent my thoughts on this, and that's fine by me.  Call me what you want; whatever term means "I don't bat an eyelash whether you like men or women."

As a straight white guy, you can imagine I've faced little to no real prejudice against myself in my 31 years.  It pains me to see people with a different skin color, gender or sexuality than mine have to struggle and fight to obtain what I got for free at birth: the right to marry, freedom from most hate crimes and social skepticism and so on.  My eyes were opened to discrimination when I lived on Maui for four years with my family and I was bullied daily, beaten regularly and stabbed when I was 13 years old, just for being white.  And it sucked.  A lot.  Then we moved back to the mainland and I saw people being treated the same way I was for those four years - but this was their entire lives.  And it was worse out in the world: rape, homicide, suicide, second-class citizenship, life-long trauma and abuse just for being different.

Now, people who "look like me" have the least flak thrown their way - no doubt.  In fact, having even tasted a bit of prejudice, I was changed for life.  So let's consider some of the points being thrown around regarding LGBT's.  

I've heard it said that the movement for LGBT rights is "being blown out of proportion," that "there aren't that many of them in this country."  So first, let's look at the LGBT population of the country.  A study published many years ago claimed that 10% of the American population was LGBT, while a 2012 Gallup poll claims the numbers are around 3.4%.  Even if someone performed polygraph tests on all 316 million plus Americans, asking about their sexuality, polygraphs are only 99% effective, offering a potential error margin of over three million people.  Finding an exact report of the sexuality of the United States is impossible, but what we can do is consider the most conservative figures as an "at least" figure.  If 3.4% percent of 316 million Americans fit into LGBT identities, that makes for a 10.744 million population, which is more than the state populations of New Mexico, Arizona and Idaho combined.  Just over half that many people (excluding the slaves they owned) seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy, leading to the American Civil War.

That sounds like a lot of damn people to me.

I've heard it said that "being LGBT is a choice," not a matter of how you're born.  I'll pretend it's any of my business what the deepest roots of your sexual identity are, but only for a minute, so I can say this.  In college I read a study (my apologies for losing the source material since then) in which lab technicians sprayed paper strips with pheromones of either men or women.  They offered the strips of paper to test subjects who only knew they were there to smell strips of paper and choose which of the two they found more pleasant or attractive, or both.  The subjects had no idea which strips were sprayed with what.  Then they were asked if they identified as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc.  The results came back and the correlation between sexual identity and natural attraction to pheromones was in the 90th percentiles.  Speaking on the laws of probability, the odds that over 9 out of 10 people would coincidentally identify as a sexuality and choose their preferred gender's natural body fragrances over the non-correlating result is pretty astronomical - not impossible, but incredibly unlikely.  Other studies have been conducted since then, but the pheromone test helped seal the deal for me.  My own personal belief is that people are born with their sexuality, even though it often makes itself known in adolescence.

Many people believe, however, that sexual identity is a choice.  Travis Nuckolls released a YouTube video in 2008 asking people on the streets "So when did you choose to be straight?" and it makes a good point - it's worth watching just to see the expressions on people's faces - but I'd like to stick a pin in everything else for a minute and talk about the belief in "LGBT by choice."  So, if some undeniable, empirical, end-all be-all, absolute evidence were released that proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that these 10.74 million Americans were making a conscious choice to be gay or straight...isn't that at the very least a choice that they have every right to make?  If we have the right to be romantically involved with all kinds of consenting adults, whether they differ in hair color, body type, age, skin color, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, credit score and everything else under the sun, then shouldn't we also - as physically- and mentally-matured adult organisms - get to choose whether we prefer the company of men, women, both or neither?  I've made it a life habit of putting the shoe on the other foot, so if you've read this far, consider this: how would the world react if people said that being straight was just a choice - a phase or a mental condition, even, likely developed from some faulty upbringing - and eventually straights would grow out of it, stop the foolishness and find the right same-sex partner?  I hate to go out on a limb and speculate, but I imagine a lot of people would be less than thrilled.

I've heard it said that marriage equality shouldn't pass because homosexuality goes against the word of The Bible - and I'm going to offer my opinion because I'm an idiot.  Much of the debate centers on Leviticus 18:22, which reads (in the English Standard Version) "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is abomination."  Most of my religious friends practice a very "live and let live" or "love thy neighbor" attitude when it comes to religion and sexuality, but this argument is still alive in the news and such, because many see Leviticus 18:22 as indisputable evidence that homosexuality is a sin, and should therefore be against the law, especially when it comes to marriage.  The full grounds for some is "If The Bible says it shouldn't be done, it shouldn't be done regardless of what it is."  I can respect people wishing to adhere to the word of their god; however, there are dozens of other things condemned by The Bible as well.  There are passages in The Bible that forbid tattoos, working on Sundays and women speaking in church, and yet none of those things are made illegal - in fact the tattoo taboo is in the very next chapter of Leviticus.  There are lingering connotations about people with tattoos in general, but rarely are they suggested to be made against the law.

I've heard it said that that's different, that homosexuality is "the really important one" to outlaw.  And it's fine for people to believe that in their own lives, and to speak their beliefs.  The issue is generally that forcing one's religion onto everyone's law is not only a conflict of the separation of church and state, but is actually why colonists fled Europe for North America in the first place.  From the Library of Congress:  "The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens" [emphasis added].

I've heard it said that the nation is founded on Christian principles, which should be enacted into law.  If that's true, nobody told John Adams, who - alongside uniting the colonies in the revolution against Britain - also said "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."  None of this is to say that the morality of Christianity - or religion in general - shouldn't overlap with society's laws, but only that forcing 316 million Americans to live in accordance with only one religion is fundamentally contradictory to most foundations of our country.

Turning away from the strictly religious facet of the debate, I've heard it said that "tolerance" is a hypocrisy because those who favor marriage equality call it being "tolerant" while also being "intolerant" of its opponents' freedoms to stand against marriage equality.  However, this is also untrue.  If a marriage equality proponent says to someone against it, "You're not allowed to think or speak on your beliefs," then that is hypocrisy - the First Amendment guarantees your right to express your opinions.  However, that opinion does not equal fact, law or justification for a crime.  To rape, shoot in the head and beat to death different LGBT's isn't anyone's right or freedom regardless of their motives, nor should a civilized society be "tolerant" of that person's actions.  This argument is akin to Hitler addressing America and saying "If America is all about freedom, why am I not 'free' to commit genocide in my own country?"

I've heard it said that allowing same-sex marriages will make hetero marriages "less special" and "less enjoyable," and that it "takes away straights' freedoms."  When America freed its African-American slaves, did whites all decide that it wasn't as fun or exciting to be free anymore?  Did whites have less freedom (besides the abhorrent privilege to own, rape and kill another human being as their own property)?

In summation?  Whether you believe sexuality is genetic or a choice, the LGBT population isn't going away.  The camps they're sent to, to "pray away the gay," will look in 50 years like a Whites Only bathroom.  The "gay agenda" is to not fear for one's life walking down the street.  And opinions opposing it are legal to express - but subjugation, harassment and violence in the name of that opposition are not legal, nor respective of the society we claim to represent.  Think what you will, but I say when one in six gays report being a victim of a hate crime, and only one in 10 crimes reported lead to a conviction, it's hard to claim that the perpetrators are the ones under attack.

31 Days of Halloween: Week 2 Round-Up.

Welcome to the (approximate) halfway point in 31 Days of Halloween!  We're at the spooktacular point of no return and it's been a hell of a week, which has awarded us the opportunity to ruminate on and study horror and the meaning of Halloween.  I've got a couple tricks up my sleeve to announce today just after our daily rundown of movies, so let's get right to it.

Day 8: Silent Hill: Revelation

Video-game-to-movie adaptations usually flop, or are at least abysmal efforts at transposition.  While Revelation certainly had a couple more problems than its predecessor, Silent Hill, it definitely works as (if nothing else) entertaining fan service for games like Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Origins.  I also wanted to watch it as an example of continuing a successful horror franchise, which can sometimes manifest as beating a dead horse or milking a cow for all it's worth.

Day 9: Last House on the Left (1972).

Last House on the Left is an early effort from both Wes Craven (of the Nightmare on Elm St. series) and Sean S. Cunningham (producer of Friday the 13th).  It's also one of the most disturbing and uncomfortable films I've ever seen.  It truly excels at delivering prolonged, unsettling torture visited upon the innocent at the hands of inhumanly cruel killers.  Craven's genius moves us to a place where we want the victims' horrific ordeals to be over with so badly, we actually pray for their deaths to come sooner.  It takes serious bravery to commit to the type of darkness that Craven has the killers show throughout the film, to the point that the victims pass the point of no return and all we can hope for for them isn't a miraculous escape, but a quick and merciful end.

The other grisly element of the psyche these killers exhibit is how their mood changes once they're done committing their vile deeds.  In the moment, they laugh, tease and cajole, happy to victimize innocents and see them reduced to nothing.  Immediately afterwards, however, they find themselves depressed, silent, and eager to forget.  Their game is over, they come down from their "high" and for just a moment, see the world through crystal clear lenses.  It's difficult to stomach, but an effective and brilliant portrayal of human evil.

Day 10: Puppet Master.

File this under "confronting childhood fears," which will also be the case when I watch Ghoulies later this month.  Puppet Master is a great off-the-wall movie about puppets coming to life and murdering humans - and, contrary to Child's Play, none of them are children's toys or puppets that resemble dolls or Cabbage Patch Kids.  The puppets in Puppet Master have no aesthetic purpose besides killing humans and scaring audiences.  One wears a black trenchcoat and fedora, with a hook for a hand a knife held in the other.  Another has a working drill replacing the top half of its head.

Day 11:  Battle Royale

In Battle Royale, the government has passed a law to control a working-class rebellion by holding an annual contained bloodsport fought by randomly selected children.  The children fight to the death in an arena and the final combatant is the winner, allowed to go home and be a hero to the nation.  If one clear winner isn't determined after three days - if, for example, all the kids refuse to fight - all the children will be killed by those who run the program.  Elected officials and the super-rich place bets on the winner of the game, as all children receive backpacks with different weapons at the onset.  If this sounds familiar, feel free to join the years-long discussion debating whether or not The Hunger Games plagiarized Battle Royale.  At any rate, this terrifying film is a daring and horrific look at the worst that people are capable of - even people as young as children.  42 students participate in the Battle Royale program in the film.  Only two are actively interested in killing their classmates, while many others attack others out of sheer panic and pre-emptive self-defense.  Some kill themselves, believing their victories to be impossible; others are determined to hide and wait it out, believing an alternate answer will come.  Similar to Lord of the Flies or The Mist (see below), Battle Royale is an experiment in the tolls that lawless panic take on seemingly normal people.  Brilliant film, based on an equally brilliant book.

Day 12: Silent House

I make it a point every year to roll the dice on a few new titles I've never seen, and on the 12th day of 31 Days of Halloween, I did so with the Elizabeth Olsen home invasion piece Silent House.  Elizabeth Olsen is the younger sister of the infamous Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, but it seems that their last name is where the similarities end.  She competently pulls off this 80-minute piece about a young woman flipping a house with her father and uncle.  She finds herself alone and scared quickly enough, as someone breaks into the house and knocks her father unconscious before dragging him off to an unknown part of the house.  The filmmakers chose to present the film as one flowing 80-minute take to better emphasize the tension and flow of time.  This also means the film proceeds in real time, taking place over an 80-minute period of one evening.  Some sources claim the film was shot in 10-minute segments and edited to appear as one take, though in my viewing I didn't notice a possible break in shooting for the first 45 minutes of the movie.  I was, I admit, more impressed by the presentation of the film and its execution than I was by its screenplay's third act, which fell flat on a horror cliche of which I've never been a fan.  Even still, the long takes, clever scares and amazing use of the setting - 99% of the movie takes place in the house without ever feeling boring - are very much to be commended.

Day 12 Bonus Round:  Busch Gardens (Williamsburg, VA) Howl-O-Scream

For a company outing, we toured Busch Gardens' haunted theme park Howl-o-Scream, which boasts six haunted houses and several frightening paths to walk through in the park.  Park employees dress as horror creatures (vampires, mutants, zombies, etc) and stalk park attendees throughout the grounds or jump out at them from well-hidden spots in the haunted houses.  The haunted houses included Dead Line, an Italian metro zombie motif; The Haunted Cove, a spooky pirate area; Bitten, a vampire haunted house; Root of All Evil, a mutant greenhouse; 13: Your Number's Up, a haunted house exploring 13 phobias from enclosed spaces to clowns; and Catacombs, a classic underground/skeleton haunted house.  All six had dark designs and great scares, never once delving into the cheesy or unimpressive.

Day 13: From Dusk Till Dawn

This horror-comedy from screenwriter Quentin Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez is a great predecessor to their 2007 double feature Grindhouse.  There's nothing I can say about it that hasn't been said earlier, better and by smarter people, so I'll leave it alone and only mention that it's one of the funniest and most quotable movies of its time.  It's a prime example of the '90s indie film scene.  And hey, Tom Savini is in it!

Side note for Day 13:  On October 13, the new season of AMC's The Walking Dead premiered, which was released the following day on iTunes.  While it may focus more on drama, I firmly believe it works great as a horror show as well.  If you're enjoying horror with us this month - especially if your collection is running on fumes before Halloween - feel free to incorporate some Walking Dead for your count!  It's a great show, and even if it were 45 minutes of sipping tea and discussing Eastern philosophy, it would still be doing so amid the zombie apocalypse, so knock it out!  We're watching too!

Day 14:  The Mist

As we traverse 31 days of celebrating horror, I become more and more inclined to write open love letters to some of my favorite selections, and The Mist is at the top of the pile for a multitude of reasons.

First and foremost, it reminds me of my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone - "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street."  In "Monsters," a regular American cul-de-sac descends into mass hysteria and murder after their power and phones are cut.  Why?  Because as they grow ever more fearful about their lack of contact with the outside world, they give over to panic, witch-hunting and violence.  The episode ends with the neighborhood in utter chaos, which pans all the way out to a flying saucer on a hill.  Two aliens watch the mayhem and one turns to the other and says (and I'm paraphrasing here), "See?  When we invade, we don't have to lift a finger.  If you simply remove one or two basic elements of their civilization, the humans will do the work for us of tearing one another to bits."  Like the aforementioned Battle Royale and Lord of the Flies, Stephen King's The Mist celebrates that idea by enclosing a group of 30 or so Maine residents in a grocery store with some thick alien fog outside.  They become aware of strange creatures roaming the mist and within 48 hours, their pragmatic tribe descends into religious zealotry, human sacrifice.  Some characters even discuss this process in dialogue - humans are basically good, but that may be contingent on communications working and our ability to dial 9-1-1 in case of emergency.  On the other hand, if you lock people in a small area with no lights, no rules, no contact with the outside world and so on, they'll rip each other to shreds.  One character says "As a species we're fundamentally insane.  Put more than two of us in a room and we'll start dreaming up reasons to take sides and kill each other.  Why do you think we invented politics and religion?"

Second, the creature design throughout the film is simply perfect.  From the implied-but-not-seen tentacle monster in the beginning of the film to the crab/mantis in the strip mall parking lot, these are truly frightening beasts.  A series of football-sized fly-like bugs with skulls for heads make an appearance, as does a four-winged pterodactyl look-alike, but it isn't until the very end of the movie that my favorite creature shows.  Remaining as spoiler-free as I can, I'll only say that the sense of scope in the film is laid out as more of the outside world (beyond the grocery store) is shown, and amid the widespread mist calamity is a 100-foot tall behemoth that walks on four legs.  It has a back like a turtle's shell and fleshy hooks dangle from its abdomen.  It resembles an imperial walker from the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, and it's all the more frightening that it's alive and also roaming free along a New England freeway.  If, at any point while watching the movie, you ask yourself "Well how bad could things really be out there?" this last big creature provides the answer.  Its freedom, slow movement and unimaginable genetic history speak volumes about the nature of the event.

Third, there is the inclusion of Melissa McBride as a mother of two.  McBride, best known for playing Carol in AMC's The Walking Dead, is in the supermarket in the beginning when the mist befalls the town.  She explains with utter determination that she must leave and get home to her kids, who shouldn't be alone for more than a few minutes.  Some citizens beg her to stay indoors and not risk her life, and she asserts through tears that she simply can't leave her children.  Her role in the film is only three minutes, and she owns the film for the entirety of her time on-screen.  She quietly walks out of the supermarket and her fate is unknown.  It's a masterful performance in the smallest of roles, and it's easy to see why she was brought by The Mist's director and first boss of The Walking Dead, Frank Darabont, from one project to the other.

Finally, we used to marathon certain types of movies on Halloween night in college with the familiar suffix "-palooza."  Zombiepalooza, UFOpalooza, B-moviepalooza etc.  This year we're commemorating Stephen King from October 14th to about the 18th with "Kingapalooza," by watching movies in our blu-ray collections and on Netflix Instant that are based on works by the oft-known "King of Horror," culminating with the remake of Carrie starring the amazing actresses Chloe Grace-Moretz and Julianne Moore.  We officially started with The Mist (even though we watched Children of the Corn last week) and we've got Pet Sematary, Misery and The Shining in line before Carrie.  We don't have time to run through the entire TV series of Dead Zone, and we watched The Langoliers this spring.  We may or may not watch Bag of Bones and The Golden Years, too.  If you've got any good horror marathons to watch (see also our "Surprises" below), mention them in a comment or on our Facebook event!

Surprises:  Friday the 13th and Hellraiser

As a special bonus run for 31 Days of Halloween, I spent September 30 to October 12 watching one film a day each in the Hellraiser and Friday the 13th franchises.  Hellraiser was the first film I watched for this year's film celebration, and Friday the 13th was next.  Starting October 2, I watched one film from each franchise per day until they ran out.  Nine Hellraiser movies and 12 Friday the 13th's mean I finished catching up on the 9th and 12th of October, respectively.  How do classic horror franchises age over 30 years?  The results were compelling tales of Hollywood and immortal slasher villains.  Let's take a look.

Paramount released nine Friday the 13th movies over the course of 13 years, with the 9th likely intended to be the last in a canonical series (it is, after all, called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday).  Minor chronological mulligans aside (no fewer than 15 years pass between 1980 and 1987), Paramount offers a steady stream of reliable slasher films - Jason Voorhees kills a bunch of marijuana- and sex-obsessed teens in a feat of stealth and systematic cruelty before anyone catches on and kills him again.  In fact, I'm working on a separate blog post about Jason's many returns to life that will be uploaded soon.  There's brief nudity, quick violence and frequent impalement.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  They're a series of fun and consistent horror movies, if not a bit monotone.  Some say they jumped the shark when it came to 2001's Jason X, which saw Voorhees board a spaceship in the year 2455 and slaughter young people there, but after watching the entire series in less than two weeks, it seemed more to me like a franchise that allowed itself to let its hair down and have more silly fun with itself.  Even the following film, Freddy Vs. Jason, was like a pro wrestling match between two of 1980s horror's favorite slashers: Freddy Krueger and Jason.  In the booklet "Crystal Lake Memories," which accompanies the complete Friday the 13th collection on blu-ray, there's a quote from Robert Englund (long-time actor portraying Freddy) who says that as far back as the mid-'80s, fans would ask him who could take who in a fight: Freddy or Jason, so for him it was a fun opportunity to put the rumors to rest.  After 1993's Jason Goes to Hell, the subsequent sequels (and the 2009 reboot of the franchise) comes across more as a self-aware celebration of jump scares and "immoral" teens than a campy joke.

Hellraiser and its first two sequels relied largely on the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Judeo-Christian theology and BDSM sex.  While the villains and demons explore the Biblical Hell and punishment for sin, they also wax on about incorporating pain into sexual pleasures and wearing slick black leather outfits.  The Cenobites, or demons, only appear when someone solves a mystical puzzle box.  This puzzle box is usually sought after as a mystical means to merge pleasure and pain, sex and violence, life and death.  Often, people looking for "the extremes of experience" find the box and solve it as part of their carnal desires and are punished, in a Faust-meets-goth fashion, with chains and hooks and blood-addled 1980s nightclub depravity.  The only real problem with the series arose when it moved from theatrical releases to straight-to-video.  Beginning with its fifth film, Hellraiser: Inferno, the series saw a noticeable dip in production quality, which wouldn't be a problem - Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi was filmed for $7,000 - except that the fifth through eighth films in the franchise weren't written as Hellraiser films.  Apparently, Miramax - who owned the rights to the Hellraiser universe - picked up other, unrelated horror scripts and had screenwriters make hasty rewrites to incorporate franchise favorites like the puzzle box and the series' lead Cenobite, Pinhead, into the films.  The end result on Inferno and the subsequent Hellseeker, Deader and Hellworld are movies with only tenuous relations to the franchise.  Only the most recent sequel, 2011's Hellraiser: Revelations, is based on a script intended from its genesis to be a Hellraiser movie.

Jason's and Pinhead's franchises are two lifetime case studies of keeping and discarding various elements of groundbreaking horror films.  While some of their entries are, at best, forgettable, I find it endlessly fascinating to see the transformations that culture, money and history influence.

It's been quite a bloody week, and I thank you for enjoying some of these silly ruminations on horror films with me.  We're just about, essentially, more or less, kinda, pretty much halfway through our celebration of terror and it's going swimmingly.  Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming tongue-in-cheek look at Things that Will Not Kill Jason Voorhees, and next Tuesday for our week three roundup!  Until then, stay spooked and watch some horror movies!

31 Days of Halloween, Week One Roundup.

We've had a great response to our "31 Days of Halloween" event on Facebook.  Friends, fans and strangers have checked in and started conversations with one another, logging their month-long progress with all the zeal and pleasantness we could hope for.  So we'd like to take this opportunity to do a quick review of how our week has gone.

Day 0:  Hellraiser*

I had the opportunity to pre-game our own event by getting an early start on the Clive Barker classic Hellraiser, thanks in part to its availability on Netflix Instant.  There are a number of elements in the first three Hellraiser movies that just plain weird me out to this day, and that's one of my favorite aspects of horror: the discomfort.  In Hellraiser, Clive Barker mixes a dark representation of Judeo-Christian mythology (with specific attention to the ideas of Hell, souls and torment) with a 1980s-inspired visual motif of kinky sex.  Straps of black leather, hooks on chains and flayed flesh mix filthily together with a heady air of dialogue about the indistinguishable nature of pleasure and pain, BDSM and carnal knowledge.  Talk about discomfort - as the revived, skinless body of Frank Cotten lures murder victims to his old attic to feed off them, the black leather trenchcoat-clad Cenobites lecture his innocent niece about their time dwelling on the most extreme experiences of gratification and agony.

Day 1;  Friday the 13th (1980)*

Growing up, Friday the 13th was always my favorite slasher franchise.  I'd stay up until dawn watching TNT's Joe Bob Briggs host monster movies or listening to Gilbert Gottfried bleat his comedy during pre- and post-commercial blips on USA's Up All Night.  As they hosted classic horror flicks on the weekends, nobody's were more fun than those of Jason Voorhees.  I've had more nightmares about Freddy Krueger, who seems infinitely more creative in his sadism and impossible to stop, but I'll never get sick of seeing that lumbering behemoth in the hockey mask stab and hack at this year's batch of horny stoners with a machete.  Of course the first movie has a great twist as to the identity and motive of the killer, and its gore/creature effects were produced by now-legendary fx master Tom Savini.

*  Stay tuned next Saturday, October 13, for a special blog about these two franchises.

Day 2:  Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead is my favorite horror film of all time, tied with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Dawn of the Dead features Tom Savini on its gore effects, just as the first several Friday the 13th films did, and he also has a small part as a biker near the end.  Anyway, I love Dawn of the Dead partly because it has some great social commentary on mall culture and consumerism from the zombies and the survivors both.  I'm also a fan of every other aspect of this film, from the Goblins-composed score to the contributions from legendary Italian horror master Dario Argento.  For those unaware, this film also has an incredible reach over pop culture.  Not only did it spawn a very competent remake by Zack Snyder, it also had its dialogue and music sampled and reworked by Gorillaz, White Zombie and Robot Chicken among others.   

Day 3: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

John Larroqutte narrates the opening for this amazingly disturbing horror film by Tobe Hooper.  Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of several horror films to be inspired by the real-life killer and madman Ed Gein.  Gein, a hunter in Wisconsin in the 1940s, lost his mother and was unable to cope.  He dug up her grave and those of many women in the same cemetery and turned them into decorations, props, models and objects of pleasure around his house.  Gein would pretend that he had conversations with his mother, and dress himself up in her clothing, which led to the creation of Norman Bates and Hitchcock's immortal Psycho as well as Ted Levine's character in Silence of the Lambs, and of course Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The family of psychos in Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains one of the most haunting in horror, from the near-dead grandfather who sucks blood off Sally Hardesty's finger to the chainsaw-wielding, cross-dressing, skin-wearing hulk Leatherface.  I bootlegged a copy of this on VHS when I was 14 and haven't been without a copy of it since, in one format or another.

Day 4:  Let the Right One In

Like Dawn of the Dead before it, Let the Right One In continues our trend of amazing, thought-provoking horror that led to an at-least-decent remake (Let Me In).  In the original Swedish version, young svelte adolescent Oskar is bullied incessantly by his peers and neglected more often than not by his divorced parents.  He meets Eli, a mysterious girl who appears to be his age, and the two begin a friendship and relationship that is unencumbered by her necessity to feed off human blood to survive or her need to avoid sunlight.  It took me two years to watch this after it came out, because as soon as someone used the words "vampire" and "love story" in the same sentence, all I could think of was a sparkly Robert Pattinson and fortysomething suburban mothers screaming over Taylor Lautner shirtless.  However, I've never been more glad to be so wrong about a movie.  My wife, an integral part of A Carrier of Fire, watched it with me and enjoyed it despite her aversion to most horror.  Let the Right One In works just as well as an anti-bullying drama as it does a horror film, and offers the unique opportunity to get the overarching story of a life cycle as delivered from the middle to end first, then from the beginning to middle last.  It proceeds chronologically from start to finish, but one character finds himself (at the end of the movie) exactly where another does (at the first act of the film).  Beautiful.

Day 5:  Children of the Corn (1984).

Stephen King is often referred to as the master of horror, and it's easy to see how he earned his title.  We have no fewer than five King-adapted films in our queue for the month, but we're christening it with this.  Children of the Corn takes King's usual dark satire of extremist religious zealots (see also Carrie, Needful Things, The Mist and so on) and twists it by introducing a town in which children have murdered all the adults and taken over, regularly sacrificing people in the name of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, their monstrous god.  I'm always a fan of tongue-in-cheek movies that encourage people to listen more closely to children, e.g. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Children of the Corn will definitely make you cast a sideways glance at the next group of kids you see.

Day 6:  Cloverfield.

Cloverfield offers a Godzilla-esque monster rampage in New York while giving no explicit origin or cause for the creature.  Like The Mist, Cloverfield also features some of my personal favorite large creature designs in recent memory, alongside sharp dialogue, believable character actions and chilling depictions of mass hysteria and chaos.  The most memorable scene in the film, for me, comes early on when looters in an electronics store are suddenly shown stopped dead in their tracks as they watch some of the first live news footage of what's causing the terror.  Hypnotized like children, grown men and women with computers and stereos tucked under their arms all stare at a TV in the store with the same expression one would expect should the hand of God descend on Earth.

Day 7:  Silent Hill.

Among some other classics, Silent Hill may seem like an odd fit.  Video game-to-film adaptations rarely succeed financially or artistically, and Silent Hill is a very mixed bag of excellent fan service and fright amid awkward dialogue and nonsensical character action.  However, we've been thinking and talking lately about how many different kinds of horror movies there are - there are even different kinds of crappy horror movies, which we don't consider Silent Hill to be - and wanted to round out our first week without resorting to a third day of 1980s slasher shock.  Silent Hill is the very definition of divisive horror; I often find myself eyerolling at a couple lines of dialogue but reeling back in my seat from some of the eerier images and sounds.  I cheer for seeing some of my favorite monsters and hearing some of my favorite songs from the game series, and the movie holds a special place in my heart professionally as well.

In 2011, I and photographer Ashleigh Ellis visited Centralia, Pennsylvania, for a three-day expedition of research and adventure.  Centralia has had a coal fire burning underground for 50 years and 99% of its residents have abandoned it.  Ashleigh and I spent three days on-site and in local libraries to gather facts about the town's past, present and future which resulted in A Carrier of Fire's first official release, DisasterLand: Centralia.  With a 10,000-word story dipping its toe in photojournalism, creative non-fiction, feature writing and geology, DisasterLand: Centralia is one of our favorite projects to date.

Summary

The more we fight to Contain Christmas, the more we learn about ourselves and horror.  Why do we love to get scared?  Why do some of us look away from graphic violence when we know how fake it is?  At what point does a franchise jump the shark and venture beyond a point of redemption?  Why do so many horror villains end up in space?  What's the difference between "so bad it's good" and "just terrible?"  Stick with us for the next 3.5 weeks and join the discussion at facebook.com/ACarrierofFire under our "Events" section!  We've read entries by several others watching everything from Nightmare on Elm Street to Scooby-Doo and the Legend of the Vampire.  We expect to eat a lot of giblets next week when we start riskily dipping into movies we've never seen before, in our earnest attempts to expand our libraries and when we just watch terrible movies to cleanse our palettes from all this classic excellence.

Stay spooked and eat candy!

Contain Christmas! / 31 Days of Halloween.

People like to debate if atheists can/should enjoy Christmas.  I say we can and should if we'd like.  Since having a daughter, I love Christmas as much as anybody.  I love getting together with my family and seeing how much we can all tolerate one another.  I love celebrating that I have them and they haven't found a way to get rid of me yet.  I love giving (and, yeah, receiving) presents that just don't fit into the everyday budget.  I like getting stuff for my folks and my wife and our daughter that they wouldn't buy themselves and I like that they'll pity my poor tastes and do the same for me.

I don't love Christmas for its religious purposes, but it's fine with me if you do.  Any excuse to gather loved ones and treat one another to a little gift is okay by me.  Let's do it every year; raise a glass for anything that makes people cheerier.  I say "Happy Holidays" but that's only because I don't have time to say "Merry Christmas and a Happy Hannukah, Kwanzaa, New Year's, Ramadan, Winter Solstice and so on that you and yours may celebrate in the four- to six-week window surrounding today."

But here's the thing.  I love Christmas as a two-day celebration.  Christmas Eve, Christmas Day.  Granted, I remember starting to get excited about it at the beginning of December when I was in grade school, but I always made a point to wish the Jewish kids a Happy Hannukah because I didn't want them to feel like I didn't care about them too.  I love Christmas as a two-day celebration, used to start thinking about my wish list just after the Thanksgiving leftovers got thrown out, but that was it.

And then something flexed its might over November by making "Black Friday" a term known to more than just those of us who worked in retail.  Suddenly it was a holiday on its own.  Before I knew it, all the stores started putting up Christmas decorations in mid-November.  It was one thing to step on other December holidays, but to encroach upon Thanksgiving?  Was the 25th of December a more powerful force than that whole Mayflower thing?  But I tried to keep quiet, didn't wanna be a rabble-rouser and come across as anti-Christian.  Religion may not all line up for me, but it does to 250 million Americans or so, so I didn't wish to offend.

And then it finally happened.  Santa Claus poked belly first into October, crossing that US/Mexico-like border that means so much to me.  This year, Christmas ads started airing in mid-September.  But Halloween's where I draw the line, let alone September.  I knew a fair number of pagans in and after college, and they hold October 31 in extremely high regards.  It's Samhain, the old Celtic New Year.  Some pagans celebrate their New Year's Day on February 2, sure, but a lot hold October 31 as the day.

For me it's just a day I get to dress myself (when I was younger) or my kid (now) up in a silly costume and run around the neighborhood collecting wrapped sugar, but its roots are in fear and death...which sounds glum, I know, but hear me out.  In Mexico, La Dia de los Muertos - The Day of the Dead - honors and celebrates the lives of those who have passed on.  It reminds me of a New Orleans funeral dirge or an Irish wake, conjuring images of "O Captain My Captain" and accepting death as a "mission accomplished" point of this life, which helps people cope with the tragedy and sadness of losing a loved one.  Accept the negative, but focus on the positive.  Boy I like that.  Not everyone believes in eternal life after death, and that makes me appreciate the here and now even more.

The other side of that coin is that we also have "life instincts" and "death instincts" - nurturing and destructive habits that remind us of both ends of the spectrum - and to me, getting scared out of my wits is a much more "my style" death instinct to practice than street racing, doing 150mph on a motorcycle, jumping out of an airplane and so on.  So I love a good horror movie.  I love blood and guts and panic and monsters and zombies and evil and mayhem, so long as it's all fictitious.

And herein lies the dilemma.  Christmas, generally accepted as a celebration of the birth of the Christian messiah/lord and savior Jesus Christ, is often a day of reverence for divine power, which in turn leads many to focus especially on a joy of life and fond reminiscence on the dearly departed.  And again, that's perfectly fine by me.  I wouldn't want to step on a day specifically devoted to that kind of awe-inspired appreciation of the value of life.  Unfortunately, Halloween isn't being treated with the same respect by...well, let's be honest: marketing departments.

This back-and-forth between ghosts and St. Nick isn't necessarily a bad thing.  It gave us The Nightmare Before Christmas, after all.  Tim Burton is said to have gotten the idea for the story when he saw a department store window clearing out Halloween decorations and replacing them with Christmas ones.  (Fun conversation: ask your friends if The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie)  And I'd like to do my part where holiday boundary awareness is concerned.  In a fun, jovial, well-spirited way, I'd like to invite you to join me this year on my annual 31-day campaign, Contain Christmas.

Starting October 1 and ending on Halloween night I'm going to watch, at minimum, one horror movie per night.  31 days of Halloween - minimum.  Now, as a counteractive measure, I may extend some bonus rounds into early November, just for the sake of helping The Turkey get some breathing room too.  I can't cook and eat turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy and stuffing for 20+ days leading up to Thanksgiving so someone else will have to come up with a ritual equally as stubborn and narrowly-focused to be a November counterpart to October's bout of Contain Christmas.  After 31 nights of dismemberment and dysfunction, I'm pretty pooped.

Here's the rules.

0)  If you can't make 31?  No problem!  Just let us know when you watch a horror flick (see below).
1)  Otherwise...One horror movie per night at least.
2)  They can't all be zingers, but if you have more than 31 horror movies at your ready disposal, try to cut from the bottom of the deck, yeah?
3)  If you don't have 31 horror movies at your disposal, dip into sci-fi.
4)  Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra perfectly fine.  Twilight not accepted.
5)  If you miss a night, try to double-down the next night (or in advance if you know you can't do one later).
6)  Above all else, track your progress on Facebook.  Find the event itself (starting on October 1) through facebook.com/ACarrierofFire and invite your friends.

So find yourself more than 30 scary movies, kiddies.  You've got one week to prepare.  Expect updates throughout the month.  Just to reiterate: there's nothing anti-Christmas about this fun little tradition of ours; we just think that Halloween, Thanksgiving and December deserve their own appreciation time.  If The Turkey started gobbling all over October, Contain Christmas would be called Throttle Thanksgiving.

Happy Halloween!