Unspeakable Horror!

Frank Darabont has become something of the go-to guy when it comes to brining Stephen King to the big screen. His previous two efforts, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, were critical and box office successes in which he showed an innate understanding of the source material. In The Mist, based on the much-revered novella by Stephen King from his Skeleton Crew collection, he brings that same grasp of the complexities of ordinary humans reacting to the extraordinary that King has brought to his blood-soaked pages for years now. It’s the original The Fog meets Jurassic Park steeped in some serious post-9/11 commentary on blind faith and the search for answers in times of uncommon fear and uncertainty.

Thomas Jane headlines as David Drayton, movie poster artist and devoted husband and father, who ventures into town with son Billy (the remarkable little Nathan Gamble) and curmudgeonly neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Brauer) after a fierce New England storm sends a tree through his art studio and crushes Norton’s car. While at the local supermarket, a local townsman (character actor Jeffrey DeMunn) comes running in, bloodied and breathless, with warnings about something “in the mist”. Within seconds, the titular fogbank engulfs the supermarket, stranding several dozen shoppers. Over the course of several well-executed scenes, it becomes apparent that the strange mist holds unimaginable horrors. The trapped turn to, and on, each other in their fear and increasing insecurity.

Darabont’s pacing is spot-on, with spectacular sequences of action and horror interspersed between engaging scenes of character development and human drama. Aided by the tag team efforts of Ronn Schmidt’s moody cinematography and Hunter Via’s crisp editing, Darabont’s script comes to pulse-pounding life on the screen as few horror films in recent memory have. Darabont has an effective way of bringing out the nuances of King’s written works in his screen adaptations, raising appreciation for the source material considerably in the process. In The Mist, he once again proves that he “gets it”, that the horrors lurking just under the surface of those we meet walking down Main Street USA (in this case, the local supermarket) are often more horrifying than the monsters we conjure in the darkest places of our minds.

The ensemble cast is exceptional. Jane, who brings just the right balance to his action hero and devoted father role, is every bit the leading man here and probably the most convincing parent-protector since Dee Wallace in the film adaptation of King’s Cujo. Audiences feel his heartbreak as he struggles to assuage his son’s fears in the face of mounting hopelessness. The sorely underrated British actor Toby Jones (from The Painted Veil, Finding Neverland, and that other Capote movie) turns yeoman’s work as kindly store employee Ollie into a memorably sympathetic and heroic character, while Frances Sternhagen, no stranger herself to King adaptations with her role in 1990’s Misery, is a bonafide scene-stealer here as the feisty, grandmotherly Irene. Silent Hill’s Laurie Holden and American Pie’s Chris Owen show promise as well, while Brauer does his best with his clichéd role as the “heavy”. Nods also go out to William Sadler and DeMunn who prove why character actors are so important to American cinema. It’s Marcia Gay Harden, however, who is the standout here. As the more than slightly left-of-center religious zealot Mrs. Carmody, Harden is mesmerizing to watch as she skillfully develops the character from sideline joke to minor annoyance to legitimate threat. She embodies every facet of religious fanaticism to perfection, and her performance eerily conveys the dangers of blind faith in desperate times. In the hands of a lesser actress, Carmody could have come across as pure parody but Harden nails it, taking Carmody to dramatic heights without going over the top.

King purists may find something to gripe about by way of the film’s ending, which varies significantly from the source material. Bleak and ironic to the point of absurdity, it’s both a scarlet letter on Darabont’s chest and forgivable given the near-perfection of the two hours that precede it. Hopefully, in this age of vapid remakes and the depressing lack of originality exemplified by films like Hostel and the glut of torture porn masquerading as horror it spawned, fans will forgive his transgression and realize The Mist for the red-bowed love letter to horror aficionados that it is.

Rating: 10 out of 10 Bloody Butcher Knives

The past’s influence on the present is an enduring theme in literature and the arts in general. For some, the past is a lifeline that helps them make it through the challenges of the present and onward toward the promise of a future. For others, like the protagonist in Lee Thomas’ The Dust of Wonderland, memory is a disease that infects the present and threatens the very concept of a future. In his stellar third novel, Thomas personifies the memories of the past in the images of dust:

Always there, history, like dust, frosted the present. It could be wiped away, scrubbed, and for a long time forgotten, but it always returned, settling on life’s ornamentation. If left unchecked it grew thick and opaque, covering all that might be with the filth of what had already come to pass.

Ken Nicholson is a man running from his memories, haunted by the events of the past during which questioned sexuality and the hedonistic pursuits of youth combined to lure him into the web of a seductive club called Wonderland and the seemingly unending clutches of its proprietor, the enigmatic Travis Brugier. Years after Wonderland and its owner came to a violent end, Nicholson fled his New Orleans home, plagued by terrifying hallucinations that play out like waking nightmares. But despite the physical distance he puts between himself and his nagging past, he is summoned home by his ex-wife when his son is viciously attacked. Dust tells the story of Nicholson’s homecoming during which he must confront the mistakes of his past while doing battle with a cunning evil he thought long dead in order to protect his loved one’s and his own sanity.

Thomas fashions a classic ghost story, with enough twists and turns to qualify Dust as part mystery, and strong characterizations that power the narrative forward like a solid psychological thriller. It’s often tricky business when writers blend genres, but Thomas pulls off his ambitious narrative undertaking so well here that the lines between supernatural ghost story, psychological drama, and suspense thriller are marvelously blurred – ultimately creating a wholly satisfying reading experience. He sets his story against the richly atmospheric backdrop of New Orleans - overplayed and clichéd in the hands of lesser writers - in which the fabled French Quarter and the bars of Bourbon Street come alive as secondary characters yet never overshadow. Not since Christopher Rice’s gothic gay coming-of-age tale, A Density of Souls, has a novel so seamlessly integrated the New Orleans mystique or so perfectly captured the dichotomous melancholy and pure, hedonistic charisma of the region.

The key strength in Dust is the author’s masterful use of characterization to create layers of internal and external conflicts for his players, at once humanizing them and investing the reader in their struggles. Nicholson, in particular, is a marvelously flawed creation, the embodiment of an entire generation of gay men for whom Stonewall came too late to save them from having to travel the heterosexual highway before realizing that they had missed their homosexual exit. In Nicholson, readers are made acutely aware of his struggle toward self-acceptance and how real and very difficult that struggle to reconcile the divergent aspects of family, friends, and faith can be. Nowhere in Dust is this recurring idea of the sheer messiness of the human condition more brilliantly captured than in the scene in which Nicholson stumbles upon the cathedral in which his severely injured son was to have been married:

After several minutes of uncertainty, looking into the vast and ornate temple, Ken left the church. He was being foolish, ridiculous, and desperate. He felt weak and hated himself for it. How many of his friends had he watched in their last moments of life, friends who had despised the intolerant religions of their birth, turn back to inefficient faiths? People needed their gods, he knew, and Ken wished he had found one to believe in so his prayers wouldn’t feel like the ramblings of a hypocrite, but he wasn’t going to indulge in foxhole Christianity. Not yet. Such a turn would mean all other hope was lost.

Thomas is one of a newer crop of horror writers whose writing clearly seeks to transcend the limits of a genre frequently dismissed as disposable and criticized for its excessive indulgences in violence and bloodshed that (sadly) often forsake narrative structure, mood and nuance. Thomas’ rich prose harkens back to the moodier works of Straub’s Shadowland or King’s Dolores Claiborne, while reflecting this newer and welcome trend toward literary horror from the likes of newcomers like Sarah Langan and Alexandra Sokoloff. Thomas demonstrates time and again throughout Dust that true horror need not be visceral to get under one’s skin:

How long he stood in front of the gate to Wonderland Ken couldn’t say, but he found himself terrified by the place. Like a wasp’s nest, this structure and its grounds had served as a shelter for vicious and poisonous things. History and the disease of memory emanated from the decimated structure. Windows, filthy and dark, played the films of history; they showed a magnificent courtyard and bubbling fountain, and they harbored a unique master with incomprehensible power. Ken remembered numerous wonders, numerous pleasures and a single atrocity in which four children had battled for their lives. A soft bed spoke words of confused sensuality. Hallways led visitors through priceless ornamentation. Wandering these halls were the ghosts of children who were lost in their pursuit of happiness as they served their benefactor. All was brilliant light. All was unfathomable darkness. All was fractured light. All was a story.

And, like the best supernatural horror writers, Thomas ably conveys the paranormal without getting bogged down in over-explanation or talking down to his audience. In getting across the essence of the horrifying mind control games that plague the central characters, Thomas conveys this rather abstract concept through simple dialogue between the characters. When one character likens their psychic torture to being caught in “…a mind fuck…a virtual reality game without an Off switch” the audience understands it.

At the core of all great stories is the human condition and our endless attempts to quantify, qualify, and question it. In The Dust of Wonderland, Thomas explores that totality of the human experience like a master painter, first with broad strokes to color the palate then with a fine-point brush to bring forth the depth and detail. While dodging the literary snowballs that Thomas skillfully laces with the genuine chills of an old-fashioned ghost story and hurls liberally throughout, readers will be ensnared in the intricate web of humanity he casts out over his characters, caught blissfully unaware by this dazzling portrait of human hope and heartbreak.

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There is an inherent distrust in the remake, with studio greed suspect and raised eyebrows at the directors who sign on to tackle them, their own artistry called into question. Indeed, remakes are a tricky business. Give fans a faithful redo and the inevitable question is: “Why bother?” Change up the original premise too much and risk the wrath of loyalists who scream betrayal of the source material. It’s seemingly a no-win situation, but director Rob Zombie is no fool – he takes on an iconic classic with his reimagined Halloween and straddles the fine line between the two.

Zombie’s modernized Halloween is a brutal, relentless retelling of John Carpenter’s 1978 film of the same name, itself a masterful exercise in which mood is used to create suspense. Wisely, Zombie doesn’t attempt to recreate the subtlety of Carpenter’s original here – instead using the escalating intensity of time and narrative to ratchet up the tension. The new and improved Halloween is told in three acts: Michael’s childhood that culminates in a murderous rampage against his family, his years incarcerated in the Smiths Grove Sanitarium that ends in his bloody escape, and his reign of terror over an unsuspecting suburbia on the titular holiday that took up most of the running time of the original – here condensed into the final 40 minutes.

In Act I, Zombie overreaches and his exercise in white trashiness nearly boils over the top. Understatement is an art form which the director has yet to master. Fortunately, actress Sheri Moon Zombie (in classic Hollywood casting nepotism) grounds these early scenes with her surprisingly sensitive and layered turn as Deborah Myers, Michael’s loving mother. Mrs. Zombie ably captures the essence of a young mother struggling against the hopelessness of her circumstances. Her performance is something of a revelation here (having overplayed it in both of her husband’s previous films) and helps to nicely counterbalance William Forsythe’s caricaturish performance as Michael’s lecherous, booze-guzzling stepfather. Hanna Hall, taking on the expanded role of ill-fated Judith Myers also shows promise – particularly in her grueling death scene.

Zombie does his best work in Act II, in which Dr. Samuel Loomis (Michael’s kindly psychiatrist who we meet briefly while trying to sound the future cuckoo alarm in the film’s early scenes) attempts to reach the deeply troubled boy during his 15-year-institutionalization. Zombie demonstrates that he has the directing chops to take a concept from Point A to Point B here with a nicely executed series of scenes in which we witness young Michael (played with genuine creepiness by vacant-faced newcomer Daeg Faerch) slowly descend deeper and deeper into his own twisted psychosis. Told against a backdrop of scenes in which the young Michael creates a succession of gruesome masks “to hide my ugliness”, this part of the film has an emotional depth missing from the original that makes it hard not to empathize with not only Michael’s tortured mother and his paternal psychiatrist but with the killer himself. The tragedy in these scenes comes out of the idea that love is not boundless – that both a mother’s love and the genuine altruistic desire to help another human being have their limits. And as Michael’s mother sinks deeper into despair, and the hopelessness of her life comes full circle, and as Dr. Loomis resigns himself to failure and cashes in instead on Michael’s story, there is no turning back from the monster Michael is about to become. Of noteworthiness in Act II is British actor Malcolm McDowell, who does an outstanding job fleshing out the iconic Donald Pleasance role and creating a decidedly more three-dimensional Loomis, and Zombie mainstay Danny Trejo as kindly hospital attendant Ismael Cruz whose own well-meaning, albeit untrained, attempts to reach out to Michael ultimately misfire. Both actors, along with Moon Zombie’s continuation from the earlier scenes, help infuse the film with a sense of humanity that drives home the idea that the story of Michael Myers is much more than bloodshed and carefully orchestrated scares – it’s a tragedy at its core.

While the idea of boiling down the events of the first film into a streamlined 40 minutes or so in the third act might give the impression that the audience is in for a rush job of epic proportion, Zombie actually pulls off the final frames well enough. We meet up again with baby sister Boo, now Laurie Strode, who we learn was plucked from the scene of their mother’s suicide and given a chance at normalcy via kindly parents (genre vet Dee Wallace and character actor Pat Skipper), a decidedly more middle class life in Haddonfield, and requisite gal pals Lynda (Kristina Klebe) and Annie (Danielle Harris of Halloween 4 and 5 – all grown-up and the director’s only wink to franchise fans). The stalk-and-slash action that follows is formulaic slasher all the way and Zombie plays it straight here, actually creating more of an authentic homage to the genre than Scream and its string of self-referential knockoffs that followed. It’s in this final act that we most clearly see Zombie’s ability to line-straddle than anywhere else in the film, with meticulous re-creation of certain key scenes that worked in the original layered between the infusion of a few innovations and surprises along the way. The result is an experience that’s simultaneously familiar and fresh.

While Scout Taylor-Compton is agreeable enough in the heroine role (although her intrinsic blandness reminds us of why Jamie Lee Curtis became a star in the first place), the performances in Act III are largely forgettable with two notable exceptions. Dee Wallace makes the most of her glorified cameo and infuses her too-few scenes with such naturalness that we are reminded of why the woman is a bonafide horror veteran. She is able to so effectively establish her maternal bond with Taylor-Compton’s character in the space of two short scenes that when she comes to her inevitable celluloid crossroads, the audience actually mourns her fate. And it doesn’t hurt that the woman can out-scream every ingénue in the cast. Hulking Tyler Mane is also a standout here as the adult Michael Myers. While actors in non-verbal roles are often easy to dismiss, Mane impresses with his ability to communicate using body posturing – menacing at times, vulnerable at others as the child buried within the adult monster bubbles to the surface in one surprisingly effective scene.

At the heart of Halloween – both old and new alike – is the boogeyman in human form. But whereas Carpenter’s Michael Myers was more an indestructible monster whose motivation was nebulous evil, Zombie grounds his Myers incarnation in reality and fashions him as a killing machine who’s the product of human cruelty and indifference. It’s here that the two versions vary most – and the heart of the contentious debate between fans on both side of the slasher fence. In Carpenter’s original, Myers symbolized those leftover childhood fears of the boogeyman – that irrational fear of what’s under the bed or behind the closet door. There’s a nostalgic comfort in that kind of fear, one that’s steeped in innocence and largely unlikely. And while that idea echoed the time period and worked well in the ’78 film, the limitless boundaries of nebulous evil lent itself to exploitation in a string of unnecessary sequels during which the concept of evil crossed over into mythology and ultimately cannibalized itself. Zombie’s Michael Myers also plays upon childhood fears, but those fears are now well-grounded in the reality of a modern society in which the speculative terrors lurking under the bed have become an inescapable inundation of information about global terrorism, violent home invasions, and unspeakable crimes committed against children that taint the innocence of childhood. If the boogeyman appears different, Zombie tells us here, it’s because he is. What scared us in 1978 is very different from what scares us in 2007; Zombie acknowledges that and modernizes the boogeyman.

With this modernization of the boogeyman, Zombie takes artistic license to fill in the substantial blanks of Michael’s back story in Carpenter’s original. Here we see Michael Myers reimagined as the product of a white trash background, living amidst blue collar squalor with his stripper mother, abusive, alcoholic stepfather, and trampy teenaged sister. Only the presence of pure innocence in the form of a baby sister holds him from slipping permanently into the well of evil his surroundings have forced him into; when he is separated from her, his motivation is established. In essence, Michael Myers kills because he’s searching for his lost innocence, personified in the form of his younger sister. Bullied at home, bullied in school, Zombie paints a bleak and hopeless backdrop for young Michael’s descent into madness. These scenes are vulgar and harsh, even difficult to watch at times, but they’re integral in establishing the more fully-realized character of Michael Myers. The most effective cinematic villains are those the audience can simultaneously sympathize with and loathe – Norman Bates, Hannibal Lechter, and Annie Wilkes are a few who came to mind. Zombie admirably attempts to fashion a more three-dimensional Michael Myers, employing a well-scripted back story and relying on the acting chops of Faerch and Mane to bring the character to life. Like a skilled archer, Zombie stretches his bow and lines up his arrow with as much deft precision as he can muster three films into his career; ultimately, he misses the bullseye, but the arrow hits as near to the center of the mark as it’s gotten in any previous film in the franchise – save for the original.

Chances are that Zombie’s reimagined Halloween will follow the same long and laborious road to gaining respect that some of the best (and now most revered) remakes had to traverse - films like The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing (ironically, a Carpenter undertaking). These remakes were the scorn of an entire generation who grew up watching the originals, a generation whose cries of foul eerily echo those of the Carpenter loyalists now. But, like the decade or two that it took those films to gain the appreciation they deserved, only time will tell if Rob Zombie’s Halloween will age like fine wine or ferment like stinky cheese.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Bloody Butcher Knives

A writer taking on writers in horror fiction is not a new idea. Stephen King explored the dark side of the writing life in The Dark Half (1989), Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990), and more recently in Lisey’s Story (2006). But it’s the master dark scribe’s Misery (1987) that bears closest resemblance to Bram Stoker award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke’s masterful Midlisters. Midlisters is an ambitious novella that examines the dangers of celebrity, the destructive nature of preconception, the tenuous connections between writers and their fans and writers and other writers, and the frightening concept that our own emotional well-being might just rely on others in one way or another after all. That Burke can accomplish this in a concise 88 pages is proof that his own time toiling as a midlister will be mercifully brief.

Horror novelist Jason Tennant is one of those moderately successful writers who straddle that broad line somewhere between bestseller and obscurity. Equally far from King as he is from the anonymity of a ghostwriter, Tennant is a working-class scribe plagued with the insecurities, uncertainties, and fears anyone who has ever dared call himself or herself a writer can relate to. Those literary self-doubts reach far into Tennant’s personal life, and when Burke’s narrative opens, we find him grappling with an indifferent father’s disappointment and a wife’s possible infidelity.

Tennant is surprised then when he’s invited to attend a science fiction and horror convention amongst a shortlist of guests of honor that includes his literary nemesis - Kent Gray, author of disposable “sex-fi” novels. When Tennant agrees to attend, a dark journey during which he will confront demons old and new, real and perceived, begins.

Midlisters is a harrowing and heartbreaking tale, populated with what one suspects are colorful characters based on Burke’s own ride through the midlist funhouse. Admittedly, half the fun here comes from trying to figure out which real-life writers and convention regulars Burke has met along the way may be along for the ride. It’s a brilliantly balanced ode to the writer’s life, never self-pitying and perhaps tinged with just a touch of arrogance perfectly in keeping with the requisite ego of a writer writing about the writing life. With razor-sharp insight, Burke dissects the writer’s psyche like a master surgeon. He crafts a richly layered and finely nuanced narrative here, his pen a sharp scalpel drawing painful lines through tender flesh until he can reach in and pull back the musculature to show us the bare bone underneath. And what’s underneath is the ugly, nasty stuff of the human condition.

Whereas King made Misery’s antagonist the focal point of his celebrity morality tale, Burke’s version of Annie Wilkes is a peripheral character, an insidious presence that creeps up on you versus hobbling you with a sledgehammer. It’s a wise narrative choice, and one that pays off handsomely with a far more resonant story. While the influence of King’s Misery is readily apparent, there are also shades of Enduring Love, Ian McEwan’s 1998 suspense thriller disguised as highbrow literature about a science writer stalked by a deluded religious fanatic, here. For while Burke admirably ratchets up the horror a few requisite notches at points, it’s his reflections on the true horrors of life – the fragility of love, failed expectations, death – that transcend the genre and make Midlisters something special. Something (gasp)…literary. Consider the poignancy of this passage in which Tennant confronts the mortality of his aging mother:

Jesus, I thought, when did she get so old? I’d made a point of visiting her at least three times a year, outside of holidays which we alternated with Kelly’s parents, and had never noticed before how much she’d changed from the picture of her I always saw when she was in my thoughts. I was afraid that one of these days only her voice would be recognizable, everything else loosened around her thin frame like an ill-fitting glove, as if God’s Laundromat had returned to her the wrong costume. I was more than afraid; I was terrified and saddened. She had always been a face in the audience, bearing witness to my spotlighted theatrics when the houselights had gone down. Invisible, but there.

Few writers can give voice to everyday fears with such precision, and fewer still can do so in the context of a story like Midlisters without losing momentum or tension.

It’s refreshing to find horror writers who refuse to pander to blood and guts at the expense of the more literary machinations of writing. Burke flexes both his craft and carnage muscles here with equal aplomb, with passages of visceral gruesomeness (book sandwich, anyone?) matching some genuine literary finesse as when he constructs a rather clever metaphorical parallel between the protagonist’s wife’s possible marital infidelity with another man and her unfaithfulness in reading a rival writer’s work.

With a vivid and fully realized narrator to anchor the narrative, Midlisters will mesmerize in its dichotomy of complex ideas simply executed. This surprisingly compact novella gets to the core of what makes writers tick like hungry teeth on a baby spare rib, its succulent bits of narrative meat and chewy conceptual gristle whetting your appetite and leaving you eagerly seeking out the next course to devour from Burke's literary kitchen.

Forward by Jack Ketchum

Cover and Interior Artwork by Keith Minnion

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In The Vanishing, Bentley Little’s eighteenth book, the prolific author offers up a tasty tale of murderous millionaires, nightmarish zoological hybrids, and his usual hints of Native American folklore. When wealthy businessmen from New York to LA suddenly go on violent rampages slaughtering their families, reporter Brian Howells is hot on the story. But when the story turns personal and the journalist’s own estranged father starts sending unsettling letters written in mysterious hieroglyphics and stained with bloody fingerprints to his mother, Brian is thrust into an escalating early Americana nightmare:

Yes, Brian thought. That was exactly what the shaky letters looked like, and he recalled the previous message, with its random vowels and consonants that seemed to be trying to break through the straightjacket of the alien language. It was as if his dad were gradually regaining his faculties, coming up from the bottom of some mental well and slowly remembering life in the real world.

Brian eventually meets up with social worker Carrie Daniels, who in a parallel story arc has discovered a network of hideously deformed children and their frightened mothers, all seemingly connected to the larger story unfolding around them. Brian and Carrie team up in the third act, a decidedly Mulder/Scully pairing that works well enough.

Little has always had a knack for creating realistic, average Joe kinds of male protagonists; in The Vanishing, it’s his heroine who stands out. Smart and resourceful, Carrie is a working-class Josephine fraught with Little’s patent insecurities, the kind of gal who has to go out and buy new underwear for a date. It’s always a breath of fresh air to see a character act intelligently in a work of horror, as too many of the genre’s terrors (implausible enough in their own right) often rely on the characters’ innate stupidity. But Little fashions Carrie as a refreshingly quick-witted and capable heroine as demonstrated in a key scene in which she makes a horrifying discovery while visiting the home of a wealthy suitor and purposefully cuts off her own 911 call to enhance the police’s impression of her imminent danger.

With hints of homage to everything from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and the monsters-mounting-humans mating chiller Humanoids from the Deep to Sasquatch folklore and Day of the Triffids-like botanical horror, Little runs characteristically afoul of over-ambition in concept, yet he’s somehow able to keep his narrative from veering all over the map. Reading a Little novel is like watching an attention-deficit cannibal who overstuffs his cauldron with too many body parts, never really cooking anything all the way through yet crafting something edible nonetheless.

Like in his best works, the author also gives readers an authentic ambiance of historical fiction here with some California gold country folklore and a nifty Lewis & Clark tie-in that works surprisingly well. Likewise, the insertion of perennial favorite recurring character Phillip Emmons into the action, appearing here as an armchair detective version of The Night Stalker’s Carl Kolchak, is a welcome highlight and a clever, ongoing wink to longtime fans.

Somewhere in the midst of the bloody mayhem, one of the peripheral characters proclaims: “It’s like being in a goddamn science fiction movie”. And he’s right. Little’s books have always had the comfortable predictability of a cheesy Sci-Fi Channel movie – the man-in-a-rubber-monster-suit kind that’s entertaining enough even when one glimpses a boom mike in the corner of an action shot. Here, that old Chiller Theatre influence is evident from the lurid monsters to the laugh-out-loud, expletive-ridden nursery rhymes that keep them at bay. The ending, in particular, lends itself to this idea and one can almost see Casper Van Dien or Antonio Sabato, Jr. leading the band of mercenaries down the yellow brick road into Bigfoot land.

Little has elevated envelope pushing to an art form with passages of graphic sex and violence that are downright macabre in parts, revolting in others. It’s an uncomfortable blend of horror and erotica that at times kicks you in the teeth. It’s often in this simultaneously titillating and nauseating mix of sex and violence that fans are either made or run screaming from the room, and The Vanishing will not disappoint in this aspect with its graphic depictions of creature-to-human connubiality and urine as facial treatments. Little should seriously consider coining the term “creature porn”. It’s almost a shame that such a solid writer seemingly sets out to appall because that shock value comes at a price, and the author’s brilliant underlying social themes (here a cautionary parable of environmental rape and the revenge of conservationism) get overshadowed in the grandeur of the titillation.

With the comforting nostalgia of a long-lost Saturday afternoon creature feature, The Vanishing will ably entertain despite its sometimes predictable matinee-like atrocities and Sci-Fi Channel silliness.

Be sure to check out an exclusive in-depth interview with Bentley Little in the augural issue of Dark Scribe Magazine.  Coming soon!