Tag Archives: movies

Midsommar: A great start that gets gory and infuriating

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A young couple and their friends travel to Sweden to visit a rural mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat devolves into a violent and bizarre competition at the hands of adherents to an ancient belief system.

 

I watched director Ari Aster’s Hereditary about a year ago, and it still haunts me. Not everyone had my reaction, and that’s fine, but I’m telling you, that was one disturbing damn film. I say that in a good way.

 

So when Midsommar came out, I hesitated; I wasn’t sure I could handle another Aster outing. The film was released in the golden days of 2019, and I decided to watch at last during October 2020, because, what’s a little horror movie compared to reality, amiright?

 

And to be completely transparent, I have not yet seen it. Not all of it. I stopped about halfway because it was getting dark and my stomach was starting to revolt on me as the film gradually got creepier and more gory.

 

I saw enough of it, though, to issue one blistering critique that ruined the film long before it hit Peak Gore.

 

The script of and performances in Midsommar at the top of the show are hyper-realistic and empathetic. We’ve all been on one side or the other of the opening phone calls. Then sudden grief hits, and it hurts to watch, because we’ve been there, too. Aster knows real grief and trauma isn’t, ironically, “Hollywood.” It is real and discordant and no one is pretty when they cry, not really. At the start, the film does a great job of “talk about anything other than what we’re all thinking,” and is worth studying because it is so thoroughly human (or perhaps so thoroughly American?). The cinematography is fantastic too (or at least, has been fantastic up to half way…)

 

A New York Times review pooh-pooh’d the performance of Florence Pugh, who plays the lead as Dani, a twenty-something suffering from profound depression long before additional trauma crushes her spirit. The review reduces her to a “walking wound” after the terrible tragedy in her family that opens the film. I see the reviewer’s criticism, but disagree—as someone who struggles with depression and PTSD, I felt the depiction was spot-on.

 

So far so good, eh? Wait for it.

 

At about the hour mark, not even half way into the film, things get dark and gruesome. It was appalling and shocking and effective, all the things a sequence like that should be in a horror movie.

 

But the aftermath of this event, which gruesomely kills two people, consists of two of the male leads getting into an argument over their . . . dissertations.

 

I just want you to picture being out of the country on holiday. Hell, let’s even say you’re travelling for school, for a college degree of some kind. One day into your trip, two people are killed and the folks you’re living with all say, “Oh, sure, did we not tell you? Our bad. This is our way.”

 

Would you stick around to “study” this group some more?

 

The scene immediately after these deaths is . . . um . . . unbelievable? That’s seems too gentle a word. Like, no way in hell would these two react the way they do, and the script hasn’t given us any reason to think they would. The motivations here aren’t just weak, they are nonexistent for any reasonable human being

 

Literally: “That was really, really shocking. I’m trying to keep an open mind, though,” one says.

 

Yeah, no, bro. You fucking run like your hair’s on fire.

 

So at this point, it’s kind of hard to stay tuned in. The morbid curiosity of the horror movie fan is about all the juice I have to keep going. I quit watching about twenty minutes later.

 

Listen—sometimes people do stupid shit, thus, it’s okay for your characters to do stupid shit. An astute reader, as I like to call them, pointed out that in my novel Sick, for instance, which is entirely set inside a high school where a small group of plucky survivors (sound familiar?) try to escape to a Safe Place during a Zombie Apocalypse . . . not a single one of them ever thinks to make a try for the nurse’s office.

 

That’s sort of a mistake, I suppose. If so, it’s a mistake based entirely on the fact that in four years of high school, I never one went to the nurse’s office. I assume we had one, but I swear to God, I don’t know for sure. So yeah, maybe an oversight on my part as the author, but it could be argued in context of the story that there was no need for them to try such a risky gambit. Still . . . yeah, someone should have at least pointed out the option.

 

So that was an oversight on my part. Granted.

 

The choice made at 1h 23m or of Midsommar is not a mistake.

 

It’s a choice, and it falls so flat that I can barely stand it. It’s infuriating, really, because I’m a big fan of Hereditary (in that it freaked me out so much I’ll never watch it again. That’s high praise). While the script sets up that our intrepid Americans are in fact doctoral candidates, it in no way emphasizes the great lengths to which they’ll go to get their “scoop” story for that dissertation. Furthermore, even if the script had tried to emphasize such a thing, the fact that their reaction to the horror unfolding before them is to argue about those dissertations rather than saying, “Bro, where’s the key to the car?!” is unforgiveable from a character-development standpoint. I would be happy to go along with this premise if the script had established just how critical obtaining these degrees was to the characters, but it doesn’t.

 

Of late, and I may come to regret this, I’ve tried as much as possible to insist on realism in my horror. When I’m writing or building an outline, I try to stop frequently and ask, “Now what would someone really do here?” You can motivate a character to do just about anything, and then come up with a really fun way to prevent them from getting their goal—that’s the whole point, in fact. Midsommar does not take this approach at all. It pits graphic violence against, of all things, academia, and it just does not sell for me.

 

Let your characters be real people who have real reaction commensurate with their background. Jack Bauer and Rambo and whoever else aren’t going to have a panic attack when they shoot someone. But I would. You would, too (one hopes). Those reactions are commensurate with our experience. So if you’re going to do something that would strike most people as odd, be sure it’s backed up in the character’s backstory somewhere.

 

Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions of your characters when you come to these choices. You may discover some rich gems hiding. I am working on a novel that I can’t talk about right now, but: in the story, this main character was knowingly entering into a situation where she may be called upon to take a life. Maybe several. How the hell do I motivate that? What would make a person do that? What has happened in her past to make her . . . ohhhh! GOT IT!

 

See what I mean? I made a brand new discovery about her history that gives the novel a whole new resonance.

 Do this, please, whenever your can. I don’t mind mindless horror from time to time, it has its place. So does mindless YA, mindless romance, mindless mystery. Swell. But if you’re setting out to make something else, which Midsommar is clearly trying to do, then for God’s sake, motivate those characters to justify the stupid shit they do on the page.

Why is writing endings so difficult?

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Endings are tough on writers and readers alike. For authors of course it’s hard to know if we’ve nailed an ending; and for readers, we can all name at least a few endings that left us a little cold. (I can name one right now that I think I shouted, “WHAT?!” and then shook my head for the last page or two. No, I will not name it here. Ask me at Ace or Phoenix ComiCon.)

On the other hand, we’ve all read endings that really soared too; that left us weeping sadly (not me!!!) or weeping joyfully (also not me!!!). But as an author, how do you take a reader there?

I’ll go into more detail on this in a new project I’m working on, but for today, let’s stick with the following:

1. The protagonist needs to change. This is all but an absolute requirement, and I’d say it’s pretty much a requirement of all genre fiction. It needn’t be the basis of the novel, but do give us some sense that the hero is not who she was at the beginning.

2. The ending needs to be in context of the storyworld. I talk a bit about this in my new book How To Write Your Novel By Watching Movies First, which you should totally get right now, but the short of it is this: If you’ve presented us with a novel set in the real world, then there better not be any aliens showing up at the end (unless that was the inevitable thing we knew about at the start). You opened your book with several promises: this is the genre, this/these are the hero/es, here’s the story problem. Deviating from any of these at the end is not going to endear you to readers.

This brings us to twists and surprise endings, but we’ll come back to those another time. Right now, just know that you’ve established a premise in the novel’s opening pages; the ending should be the payoff.

3. Word choice and cadence or rhythm matter. Remember how Morgan Freeman said, “I hope,” at the end of The Shawshank Redemption movie? It’s the same last words of the novella. Now imagine him saying, “I have hope.”

Ehhh . . . it lacks somehow, doesn’t it? I think it’s because “I hope” is active; it has momentum and breathes on its one. “I have hope,” while not a bad sentence and is still true in the context of the story, sounds like something possessed; something inanimate like a pencil or a phone. “I hope” has a different cadence than “I have hope,” and is by far the stronger choice. So sound out those last few sentences, and make sure you’re writing and punctuating them the way you hear them out loud.

4. What have you liked about other novels? Think of the top three or more books that left you a little breathless or somehow emotional, and study how that author did it. You can’t (usually) rip off an exact ending of course, but ask yourself why a particular ending had the impact on you that it did. Then go back and compare those notes to your novel. You might discover something.

Good luck sticking the landing on those endings! It can be challenge, but it’s a good feeling when you know you’ve got something. Keep writing!

(And if you liked this post, please share it; if you want to learn more, drop me a line!)

 

Oh, the horror: Stephen King’s THE MIST; WORLD WAR Z; and more

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In honor of the release of HELLWORLD, here’s a quick look at some of my favorite horror out there. Enjoy! (p.s. Yeah, there are some affiliate links scattered about in here. That’s because you have got to read these books.)

The Mist by Stephen King

No discussion of Stephen King’s The Mist would be complete without an aside about the differences between the novella and the movie. I’ve waffled on this one, to some degree. I love the ending to the novel. It’s a theme King has used before, most notably in Shawshank, and it’s the one I most often write about myself.

The 2007 Frank Darabont movie took the original theme and, in my humble opinion, decimated it. Just spread ‘em and took one giant enormous crap on the whole thing, and I was just as pissed when I first saw it as I sound right here. Unforfuckinggiveable. And then I read the King said he wished he’d thought of it! GAHHHHH! Steve, you’re killing me, here!

…Okay. Then I took some time away and gave the movie another look. And I still prefer the novella. But…now I can sort of see where the theme is actually intact, and that Darabont just got there in a different way. I don’t like that way, but I will grant it some grace (because, you know, Stephen King loses sleep over what I think) because Darabont does make the point a bit more…forcefully…than King did.

Having said all that, the movie is otherwise pretty damn faithful, and I appreciate that. But as always, the book is better. Especially when narrated by the spectacular Frank Muller. Any time you can hear a King book narrated by Muller, do it. The man was magical, and taken far too early. (God rest ye, Mr. Muller, and thank you.)

The Mist has influenced a whole, whole lot of my writing–Hellworld is no exception. I have always had a soft spot for stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The movie and novel Fortress by Gabrielle Lord comes to mind, that one about a group of Australian children kidnapped by four men for ransom…and what the kids do after being pushed to the edge. (That should probably be its own post. Also I’ve learned some things about the author’s politics that sort of sour me on the story, but if you can put that aside, Fortress is still amazing.)

This whole idea of “Everything was fine, and then out of nowhere, monsters!” is attractive to me for some reason. I guess because it’s real life writ large: everything was fine, and then out of nowhere, cancer/car accident/she cheated on me/whatever. We all know, and horror writers prey on this fact, that monsters do exist. They just sometimes look like parents, spouses, pastors, children, or the IRS.

One thing I love about The Mist so much is that it reads as though King was sitting there for a handful of days, pounding out the words, asking himself, “I wonder what happens next?” and having no idea until he wrote it. It doesn’t read like a well-planned story; it reads like the diary we will come to realize it is at story’s end. It reads like King put himself in that situation, and just kept asking himself what he’d do if in it.

That’s a very fun way to write.

The Mummy, The Will, and the Crypt by John Bellairs

Before there was such a thing as a Young Adult section in the bookstore, there was Juvenile Fiction, and there was Adult Fiction. That’s it. You had your Judy Blume, and you had your Stephen King, and never the two shall meet. Then you had your awkwardly juvenile like the inimitable Robert Cormier—awkward, because while his characters were teens, his themes and often plots were not. But there was no YA, so he got shelved in Juvenile.

Back in those heady days before Goosebumps—which we will return to in a future blog—if you wanted horror, real supernatural shit, there was one place to go: John Bellairs.

Bellairs (who, I am sad to report, passed away in 1991) was introduced to me via his first juvenile novel, The House With A Clock In Its Walls. Pretty good stuff; atmospheric and very literary (in retrospect. Back then, “literary” just meant “how books were written.” We didn’t have quite the breadth of Voice that readers today enjoy). I enjoyed and have read all of Bellairs’ work multiple times, but when it comes to the creep factor, none of them touches The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt.

I read Mummy at an age when I should not have been watching slasher movies, but did it anyway. By B-horror film standards—think Basket Case, or Tourist Trap—Bellairs’ work was tame; it was for children, after all, and this is in a time before Hunger Games and its explicit violence toward children ever would have made it to an agent’s desk. By today’s standards, Bellairs is working with his hands tied: he needs to be legitimately frightening but not bloody, gory, or even necessarily violent.

With Mummy, he succeeds spectacularly. The plot revolves around young Johnny, who becomes obsessed with finding a lost will of a powerful cereal magnate. There’s a reward for whoever finds it, and Johnny needs the money to pay for an operation for his grandmother. Pretty straightforward. But Bellairs populates his novels with quirky but utterly believable characters: Johnny, a bespectacled little nerd who—and this is brilliant, I think—manages to catch a cold before breaking and entering into the estate of the deceased businessman. It’s a small detail, but Bellairs takes that common experience and lets it work into Johnny’s climactic break-in. Think about it: When you have a bad cold, do you feel like getting off the couch, much less travelling halfway across your home state, at night, in the winter, alone, to break into an abandoned mansion?

Then there’s the Professor. One of the greats in literature, if you ask me; the Professor is an old man, seventies or so, who is as cranky as he is loyal. Bellairs breathes great life into this old guy, and builds a Miyagi-Daniel relationship between he and Johnny long before Karate Kid came on the scene. He also introduces Fergie, a gangly nerd who becomes Johnny’s first real friend; great comic relief and a stalwart ally in Johnny’s insane scheme.

Now what about the horror? Suffice it to say Bellair’s description of a walking, undead mummy influenced Hellworld to the point of outright homage. The book has a nasty witch, an eerie ghost, and the aforementioned mummy.

Bellairs excels in two particular areas: believable characters and authentic, gripping settings. Most, if not all, of his novels all occur in the Eastern U.S. near or during the Second World War; no cell phones, kids! Hell, sometimes not even a landline, depending on the location. But this isn’t just a gimmick, and it is not romanticized. Johnny’s dad in Mummy is a pilot, and all he or we know is that he was recently shot down over the Pacific, and no one seems to know if he’s alive or dead. With that palpable dread setting the scene, Bellairs goes on to give us chilling atmospheric details that captures things like what it might feel like to really, truly see a ghost come floating out of a window in the dead of night.

Grown-ups could read Mummy in an afternoon; it’s about the length of a Judy Blume YA. I think if you’ll give this Bellairs novel a shot, you’ll soon want the others, too.

(One note of caution, though: Because Bellairs passed away at a relatively young age, he left incomplete manuscripts behind, which were summarily finished and released by his publisher. I don’t recommend these; they are too plainly not the real Bellairs. I appreciate the attempt to honor his memory, but those novels fall short in my opinion.)

World War Z by Max Brooks

There are only a handful of books I really, truly, deeply wish I had written. Books that literally make me angry that I did not write them. One of them is World War Z.

I’ve met Max Brooks twice—and  was smart enough to get a picture the second time—and I’ll never forget the look on his face when I told him I thought Z was one of the most intelligent novels I’d ever read. “Wow, really?” he said, or something like it. “Thanks!”

It’s true. The conceit of Z is simple: Instead of being about a zombie apocalypse, it’s in the aftermath…and humanity won. We did it. Brooks has written a horror novel that, no matter how you cut it, is one of optimism and faith. I mean, what an idiot, right? How the hell do you begin a novel by essentially stating, “The good guys win in the end”?

That’s exactly what he does, and that’s exactly why it works. The novel is told as a series of interviews of survivors, people who are now a part of rebuilding civilized society (no Governors or Negans here, thank you). The “interviews” are as authentic as any you’d read about Germany, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. They are full of blood and viscera, terror and fear, as told by those who went through it, losing all they had in the process, barely escaping with their lives.

And in doing so, Brooks is able to insert gentle social commentary along the way. My favorite: Floridians building boats in near-hopeless attempts to sail to Cuba, where they hope to find work as maids and house cleaners. BOOM!  That is awesome.

World War Z cannot be replicated. The movie, without the book, would have been an entertaining little zombie flick; that they did not do exactly what Brooks did with the book is unforgivable. Imagine any number of Hollywood heavyweights—many of whom narrate the audiobook, beautifully—doing Band-of-Brothers-esque interview sequences about the zombie war. Just think about it. Can you see it? Ugh! I hope Brooks is allowed to do something like this in the future.

Anyway. There’s enough gore to keep the horror kids pleased, and zombie fans sated. But World War Z is really a book for just about any reader who enjoys strong, well-written fiction. Again, Brooks’ fundamental optimism about humanity is unrelenting, and that sets it apart from any other horror novel out there. Give it a shot, if you haven’t. Or at try the audio, which is abridged (sadly), but still excellent.

Nice to have met you, Mr. Brooks. Thank you!

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Liked SICK? Read THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

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BEST BOOKS BLOG #1

The Girl With All The Gifts

I’ll be posting 10 or so new blogs about books and media that are somehow related to HELLWORLD (which you can pre-order now!). Up first, a wonderfully written novel that should please fans of my novel SICK.

 

Melanie gets strapped to a wheelchair every day in order to go to school with several other young people. They exist in an apocalyptic world where most of humanity has died off…or rather, “died” with air quotes because a lot of folks infected by the disease that wiped humanity out are out there, and they’re hungry. What Melanie doesn’t understand at first is that she and her classmates are being used—that is, dissected—in order to try and find a cure or a way to stop the progression of the disease.

So yes, technically THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is a “zombie” novel. But it’s really so much more, and so much better, than that.

Written by M.R. Carey and now a major motion picture with Glenn Close, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS succeeds on its surface as a horror novel, full of dread, panic, and just enough gore for the gorehounds to enjoy. If that’s all a reader wants to take from it, so be it, but they’d be missing a whole lot.

Carey (https://twitter.com/michaelcarey191) excels at writing three-dimensional characters, people so real you’re sure you know them, and all the more infuriating (in a good way) when they behave as real people actually do (especially real people under mortal stress). If you are a writer in need of a crash course in plotting, this would be great book to study: the main characters are under constant threat, which keeps the energy and pacing high even though Carey’s writing is blocky (big chunky paragraphs rather than the short, zippy grafs I like to use myself). Something else that sets this novel apart from other genre novels: There is no predicting the outcome.

Fans of any genre tend to know where things are going. It doesn’t stop us from reading more in that genre, of course. In fact, there’s a certain comfort to the predictability. Not so with THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS. I can’t recall the last time I read a novel where I thought, with virtually every turn of the page, “What in the hell is going to happen to these people??” That’s not an easy feat, but Carey does it wonderfully.

I took notes in the margins of this novel to refer to later. I’ll leave with my one-word summary, scrawled in black ink at the bottom of the last page:

Wow.

Highly recommended for you fans of SICK! For you writers, head over to hellworld.co for short post on using this novel as a reference!

 

…but half will.

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One of my favorite movies is Teachers with Nick Nolte, Ralph Macchio, a teeny tiny Laura Dern, JoBeth Williams…ah, anyway, a bunch of good actors.  It has one of my favorite set of movie lines ever and is the topic of this evening’s post.  Ralph Macchio’s character has set off the school fire alarm, and the entire high school empties out into the parking lot, thrilled to be out of class, smoking in the parking lot, etc.  Nolte, a teacher, has this exchange with Judd Hirsch, a vice principal (paraphrased):

HIRSCH:  Alex, half those kids won’t come back after the fire alarm.

NOLTE: But half will.  I think they’re worth it.

They are.  They’re all worth it.  Lookit, trust me, there’s a whole lot of teachers and other grown-uppy types out there who were probably certain where my future was, and it sure as hell wasn’t where I ended up (thank God).  I wouldn’t say I was a bad kid, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.  What I do know is this: A small but dedicated group of those grown-uppy types didn’t give up on me.  They were hard sometimes, they lost patience with me, yes, and some of ’em I went out of my way to make miserable.  (Apologies for that, if any of you are out there.) 

But when all was said and done, they said, in effect, “He’s worth it.”  They didn’t have to.  They chose to.  And in about six weeks, my first novel is going to be on the shelves as a result.  I was one of the half that came back.  So were most of my friends.  Where might we be if not for those teachers and leaders who didn’t let us give up on ourselves?  (Not blogging on my author website, for one…)

I can’t take back a lot of the evil, vile crap I did to some of my teachers over the years.  But I can and I will do my best to pick up where they left off.  Fact is, a pretty large percentage of teens only needs one thing: for one adult to stand up, to fight for them, to be there.  Yeah, they’re gonna mess up, make mistakes, pull fire alarms.  That’s what teenagers do.  (And I get to write books about it!) They also care tremendously – about a lot of different things.  They have the time and energy to devote to change things that  a lot of us grown-uppy types don’t.  Or won’t.

This applies equally to adults and teens:  Don’t let anyone ever, ever tell you can’t do something, and don’t ever give up on going after what you want.  Make choices today, even small ones, that will bring you closer to your goals.  Because half the people you know today aren’t coming back after the alarm.  But half will.  The only question is, which group do you belong to?

I think you’re worth it.