"When we die, we will die with our arms unbound."

[greygirlbeast]

Perhaps we've entered the cool descent to autumn. It's too early yet to tell, but the highs have dropped into the upper 70sF. Cloudy today.

Yesterday was entirely consumed by email and putting together the text for the Kickstarter project to help fund the trailer/photo shoot for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. And I think this is only happening because kylecassidy did the number crunching. I certainty don't have the patience for it at the moment.

I'm hoping that Sirenia Digest #68 will go out before midnight. I just need to get Vince's illustration for "The Granting Cabinet" and have the whole thing PDF'd.

I think my triggerpunk proposal went over well yesterday. The only potential problem I foresee are readers who think they're buying books about guns. Because, you know. Readers think things. But consumers...consumers think the worst things of all, much worse than the things readers think. I have often marveled that people who are comfortable being called consumers (or who so name themselves) are able to think at all.

Oh, and may I just say: Anne Hathaway as Catwoman? Mrrroow....

---

Last night we saw Jim Mickle's Stake Land (2010), and as it was yet another entry in the parade of post-apocalyptic vampire films, I went in with lower than zero expectations. And...surprise. It's, I shit you not, fucking brilliant. Imagine The Road crossed with I Am Legend, and that's not right, and sort of demeaning (reducing everything to the Hollywood pitch), but it puts you in the neighborhood. The vampires are terrifying, but Mickle presents an Aryan Christian doomsday cult as an even greater threat, and his cinematographers use the landscape through which the characters wander to create the most quietly terrible menace of all. It is, in fact, a marvelously quiet film, punctuated by sudden bursts of violence. Very good film score. The vampires are the absolute antithesis of the "sparkly" foolishness. For that matter, they're the antithesis of any image of the vampire as a romantic figure. This film highlights the very thin line between vampires and zombies. Remember, kittens: George Romero was inspired to make Night of the Living Dead (1968) by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, a novel about a vampire plague, not a zombie plague. Actually, Romero said "I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel...", and "I couldn't use vampires because he did."

Anyway, with Night of the Living Dead, Matheson reinvented the zombie, just as writers like Anne Rice would go on to reinvent the vampire. In Stake Land, Mickle yanks vampires violently, splendidly, with beautiful horror, back towards their roots. And if anyone dare complain this feels more like a zombie movie, that's only because they've never read I Am Legend and/or don't know of the origin of Night of the Living Dead. Truly, Stake Land is the first vampire movie in a long time*** that made me a little less ashamed of my fascination (nigh unto fetish) for bloodsuckers. But, a caveat: if you're the sort whose put off by artistic triggerpunk – and we are talking major fucking "triggery" shit here – then you may want to sit this one out. Stake Land is art, and it is beauty, and it is hideous, and it is trauma. It's despair, almost, almost eclipsing any hope. Unless you can simultaneously embrace all these things, it's not a film for you. But I fucking loved it.

So come to me.
Come to me now.
Lay your arms around me.
And this is why,
This is why,
We fight.
Come Hell.
Come Hell.
Come Hell.
Come Hell. –– The Decemberists

Needing Red Bull,
Aunt Beast

*** The last, of course, was Tomas Alfredson's Låt den rätte komma in (2008).

Comments

[joshrupp.livejournal.com]

Matheson vampires vs. Myers vampires would be cool. People would think that glittery confetti was drifting down from the buildings, and that would make them happy and they'd whistle as they walked ... unaware that another Edward just got shredded.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

I think you made my brain hurt.

[joshrupp.livejournal.com]

Damn. And it was such a nice brain, too.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't worry. It hurts a lot, but still keep chugging along.

[kurtmulgrew.livejournal.com]

I will have to look for that when I go to the movie store today.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

You really, truly should.

[kirby-crow.livejournal.com]

The scariest vampire novel I ever read was "Salem's Lot". Hands down. Nooo sparkles there.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

I used to love that novel, but then, in the late eighties, I fell utterly out of love with King. I re-read the novel in 2004, and it came across horribly dated and a little hokey.

Sparkly (spit) vampires

[jessamyg.livejournal.com]

I'd love it if there was a nice and cute and sexy vampire, the protagonist falling in a swoon into their embrace, then the glamour being ripped away and they rip them into little gobbets of flesh. It's a dream, really.

Apart from let the Right One In the other vampire fiction I'm enjoying at the moment is Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's Strain trilogy. yes, vampires are good when they're sexy and alluring, but nasty is good too. It's nice to vary ones diet.

I agree that 'Salems Lot is dated now, but it was great fun at the time, since it was meant to be I Am Legend meets Our Town if I remember rightly.

Re: Sparkly (spit) vampires

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

since it was meant to be I Am Legend meets Our Town if I remember rightly.

Pretty much.

[lois2037.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that Romero held back from using vampires, since he ripped off I Am Legend and the subsequent film The Last Man On Earth pretty much scene for scene. Always hated Night of the Living Dead because of that, and have little respect for Romero.