Crisis Averted

The muse has returned.

In the end, the solution was to go out and have sodas and french fries with a writer friend, Cherri Galbiati. We sat out at Denny's until one in the morning, bouncing ideas off of each other.

(btw Cherri, if you're reading this...I've changed my mind and decided to let the dog in the story live.)

It's a relief to sit down in front of the computer, armed with a story. Sitting in front of a blank screen, with nowhere to go, is a terrible feeling. You want to produce, to create, and nothing comes. You start wondering if you're all washed up and out of ideas. You're as bad as any angsty teenager, and probably twice as annoying.

But, I now know the bribe price of my muse. French fries and chatting with a friend. I can live with that. Now to get to work.

The Dry Spell

Ye Gods, I am doomed.

I have hit the dreaded dry spell. My imagination offers me nothing but rehashes, or less, for story fodder.

I lay in bed at night, struggling mightily to call a muse. Just one. One teensy little muse. Even a little baby muse would be fine. I'll bake it cookies or anything it wants.

How do you bribe a muse anyways? Food? Candy? Drugs? Whatever, I'm ready to cut a deal. Just show me the way to the little fellers.

Where No Man has Gone Before

After putting the kids to bed last night, I took advantage of the peace and quiet to sneak off and watch the new Star Trek movie. I had been hearing good things about it, but because I'm only slightly less of a purist when it comes to the original series than my wife is (who refused to see it) I was prepared to hate it. So how did I feel about it? The short answer is...

...I liked it.

Now, there are caveats. There was a major divergence in Spock's character that I'm not so sure about And a big plothole regarding the bad guy (where did he just disappear off to for 27 years, and how would he know old Spock was coming anyways?) kind of reared it's head for those who care about those things, but overall it was a good movie.

The charactors were sound. The creators of the movie made the smart choice of getting actors to play the charactors, and not the former actors. This avoided the pitfall of the movie turning into a contest of who was the best impersonator. The actors playing Spock and McCoy would have won that contest hands down though. Thats not to say that the other charactors weren't done well. Kirk was very good, Uhura was very good, Scotty was great, Checkov was good, Sulu was very, very good, and the actor who played Captain Pike completely redefined the role. Unfortunately Yoeman Rand and Nurse Chapel were conspicuous by their absence.

The action was great, although I still think the whole scene with a young Kirk trashing a sports car felt gratuitious and tacked on. Overall, it definitaly payed homage to the original series in a very updated way. It had that wild west feel to it that the other trek series lost.

Is CGI Ruining Thrillers/Horror?

There has been a trend of remaking movies lately, and a few specific examples come to mind.
Godzilla, The Fog, and The Haunting probably represent good examples of my point.

(I would also like to add another movie on my rant list, "Eight Legged Freaks". Although not a remake, I still unconsciously compare it to Tarantula, which is what I was hoping it would be)

These were all remakes that had much larger budgets than their predecessors, and on top of that had access to a new technology that literally lets you put anything you can imagine on the screen...CGI. All were free to display their monsters and haunts in full splendor, without any constraints. And they did.

But an odd thing happened. The movies fell short of their predecessors. Now a lot of things could contribute to that, but I sort of sensed the presence of CGI to be a huge contributing factor. It seems that when you have the ability to "show anything", many filmmakers go straight to doing just that...without ever asking if that's really a good idea. You would think their writers would know better.

A writer has always had the ability to "show anything", and is constantly weighing the value of what to display and what to keep hidden. He has to appreciate that those decisions dictates the very type of story his piece will turn out to be. As the old maxim goes, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

The Victim

Ever wonder why some of the old hack and slash films of the eighties got varied responses to their on screen murders?

Why were the perils of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, and Sigourney Weaver in Alien, reacted to in one way by an audience...when the varied lineups of victims in the friday the 13th series, which sometimes included future stars such as Kevin Bacon and Crispin Glover never seemed to garner the same audience "concern". When ghosts threatened the Freeling family in Poltergiest, we feared... yet when ghosts stalked the occupants of Hill House in The Haunting, it somehow lacked the same elements despite the superior CGI effects (and I have a whole future post I'm dreaming up on the subject of whether or not CGI has ruined horror films).

How much of that has to do with the victim?

The "victim" has an important role to play in a thriller, as s/he plays 50% of the dynamic in the antogonist/protagonist conflict. An intimidating threat coupled with a victim the audience doesn't want to sympathise with, gets you your typical Friday the 13th reactions...ranging from jumps at the shock value attacks to literal cheers as an annoying cast member gets gruesomely dispatched. Unsympathetic doesn't mean unlikeble. It's not that audiences don't react to the threat against charactors they detest, it's more a matter of ambivalence. The audience has to identify with or invest something in the charactor threatened, or they can't as effectively emotionally respond to the peril the victim faces. Many movies seem content to substitute attractive victims for effective ones...

...or overly heroic ones. Notice how Jamie Lee Curtis's and Sigourney Weaver's charactors changed in later episodes. Notice how the tone and effect of the films changed with them?

R.I.P. 3DRealms

It's a sad day in the PC gaming world. One that almost everybody knew would one day come, whether consciously on subconsciously. 3DRealms has shut it's doors.

Now in all fairness, not a lot has come out of those doors in many years, especially the product that almost all PC gamers have been waiting for...Duke Nukem Forever.

The Doom Maring, Serious Sam, the prisoner from Unreal, JC Denton, were and are all great charactors in PC shooters...but none of them "kicked ass and chewed bubblegum". 3DRealms had lightning in a bottle with Duke, but they chose to exploit that through cheap console knockoffs and handheld games instead of ever delivering on the next big game of the franchise. So the years passed...

Personally, I used to be a member of their forums way back in 2001. I salivated over the 2001 video they released, and almost dreamed of more Dukey goodness on the horizon. But as the years passed and I got married, changed jobs, played other games, had kids, and life went one...DNF faded down my list of things that had my attention. Then as my gaming become rarer and became less of a priority, it fell from my attention all together.

Yet still, I feel a bit of sadness over this news. The fact that so many people followed this IP, even in the face of years of delay, meant that 3DRealms had something special...if they just could have found the means to follow through and deliver it. So it is a loss, even if it is a product that never truly existed in the first place. PC gaming just lost a bit of it's magic and mystique, because there is nobody to really pick up this torch...a torch that may not have even existed but in the minds of fans in the first place.

Say Hello To My Little Friend

Aint she a cutie? Next to the Banshee from "Darby O'Gill and the Little People," this was the next most popular guest star in my childhood nightmares. The difference is, I still have them starring this little gal from time to time.

I understand she is supposed to be harmless, but tell that to a six year old who just ran his bicycle through her web and had her crawl up his face and into his hair while he was trying to come to a controlled crash. Yeah, she didn't look so harmless then. Maybe it was karma for feeding all those grasshoppers to the spiders that hung around my childhood farm. Lets just say, the spiders at my farm were well fed and enormous.

One of these days I intend to feature this spider in a story, one way or another. While tarantulas get all the love from Hollywood, it's time somebody comes up with a way to help the orb weavers get equal time. She would also make an eye catching book cover, although it might discourage people from actually picking the book up...which sort of defeats the purpose of writing it in the first place.

Ah well, if I ever make an anthology of my short stories, she is who I want on my book cover. I'll definitely have to have one short story feature her, just to justify that. It will be an interesting challenge, since garden spiders seldom leave their webs. They prefer to let food come to them, not exactly making them the most active of potential villains for a horror story. Perhaps a little creative license with their behavior...then I can make her a star.

Then maybe she will finally join the Banshee as just a childhood nightmare.

What is Scary Pt III

In the Tower of London, it is the headless specter of Anne Boleyn that has frightened guards into fainting...and at Raynham Hall the Brown Lady stalks the house with empty eye sockets, when she's not posing on the stairs for pictures. In film, the most frightening scene in The Shining had to involve the female ghost of Room 237. Then there is the dead girl of "The Ring". And lets not forget the most memorable cause of Disney inspired childhood nightmares...one that chased me through many a dream in my youth...the Banshee of "Darby O'Gill and the Little People"

Lets face it, women make some of the most frightening of spectral apparitions, and I'm honestly surprised they aren't used more in film.

But why?

I have had it suggested to me it's because women are usually associated with nurturing and care, and that a haunt is somehow antithetical to that. Another theory is that women are the gender associated with life and beauty, so it is always a matter of disquiet to see them cast in a role involving death and corruption.

One of Poes recurrent themes was the death of beauty, a device he used quite effectively. The women of Poes stories tended to be victims though, and not so much the object of terror themselves...unless one counts the Fall of the House of Usher. Speaking of Poe, one of the most effectively scary scenes in Vincent Price's classic "The Pit and the Pendulum" involves his presumably dead wife, Elizabeth, calling her husband to him and leaving her coffin.

What is Scary? Pt II

Scary is when your internet goes away. Scary is when you find yourself cut off from the world, and news that is less than a day old. Scary is when you have an idea, and then discover you can't do a quick Google check for some quick research. Scary is when you can't reach your email.

Scary is recognizing how the internet has snuck into our lives in lots of little ways.

Most of my short stories are written in times before cell phones and the internet, yet it takes having my internet going down to really remember what a different world it used to be. In the days of yore, old men argued on porches without a handy internet to settle the argument. They had to decide who was right by good old fashioned methods...like who was willing to be more pigheaded about it, or who lied more convincingly. Now you can have an ebook reader thats always connected to wikipedia. It's like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy come to life in a strangely mundane way.

And thats the way it's going to be from now on. Only more so. I wonder where it's going next?

Now that's scary.

PS. Once I get internet back at my own home, I will explore the "why are female ghosts scarier" question.