Author Archives: Kevin Singer

American Horror Story: Coven – horror or camp?

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There’s a scene near the opening of the first episode of American Horror Story: Coven that is the definition of horror. The year is 1834, and a society madam, played by Kathy Bates, is a vain, sadistic woman who keeps a collection of slaves chained and tortured in the attic of her New Orleans mansion. The camera fixes on the mutilated people. You hear their moans and screams. It is pure horror.

But why?

Because it is grounded in the very real horror of slavery.

I’ve seen 3 episodes of this series so far (I haven’t seen the first or second seasons), and nothing else has compared to this one scene.

Don’t get me wrong, American Horror Story: Coven is entertaining and compelling. It follows a coven of witches in New Orleans (with roots in Salem) as they battle each other and the outside world. But it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a campfest or a gory/horror thriller. Too often it slides into camp.

The actors are big names. Jessica Lange is a great fit for the role of a witch obsessed with holding on to her fading looks and power. But there are times when Lange, Angela Bassett, and Kathy Bates play it way over the top. There’s not much subtlety going on. Or maybe they’re just too big for the small screen.

The best horror is rooted in real-life tragedy, both small and large, because it gets us where we live. Case-in-point: the slave/torture scene. And American Horror Story: Coven has more of this. There’s an infertile woman desperate to get pregnant, and there’s a young man who is revealed to have been molested — both are great set-ups for horror. In the latter, you get the payoff (the pregnancy storyline is developing).

So there is potential. The writers are highly skilled in keeping you watching (and I”ll definitely watch on). I just wish they wouldn’t rely on lazy tropes like the rapist fraternity brothers or Jesus freak neighbor, scale back the camp, and stick with the horror.

The heartbreaking case of Donna Noble

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Doctor Who offers a case study in stellar character development: Donna Noble. She began as someone you’d gnaw off your own arm to escape from. She ended up heroic and self-sacrificing.

The good news: there’s an outside chance that Donna Noble (played by Catherine Tate, last seen on The Office), may be returning to Doctor Who for the 50th Anniversary special in November.

For those who don’t know, Doctor Who is a British sci-fi series about a human-looking alien (the doctor) who travels through time in his blue police box-looking machine (called the TARDIS). It’s been on TV since 1963, and it manages this feat because the Doctor can regenerate into a new body (that is, new actors). 

The Doctor usually travels with a companion, who is typically 1) human 2) youngish 3) female and 4) highly impressionable. Oh, and they’re usually hot and have a crush on the doctor.
 
Exhibit A: Rose Tyler.
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Exhibit B: Amy Pond. 
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And then there’s Donna Noble.
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She was mouthy, rude and bossy. But she was also curious and persistent. And the writers gave her an amazing character arc.
 
When she’s first introduced, she’s about to get married. She’s a boorish bridezilla. When her wedding doesn’t turn out as planned (think alien spider creature), she refuses the Doctor’s call to travel with him.
 
But she changes her mind, and ends up tracking him down. Together they travel to Pompeii, get caught in a deadly 51st-century library planet, and meet Agatha Christie. Ultimately she’s given a monumental choice, the universe saving kind, but of course there’s a terrible price to pay.
 
The brilliance of her character development is that the Donna Noble we meet in the beginning would have made a different choice than the one she becomes at the end…
 
…which makes the way she ends the show heartbreaking. No spoilers here. 
 
Here’s a clip of Donna Noble from Doctor Who:
 
 And here’s Catherine Tate in one of her funniest sketches:

Sci-fi is failing us

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Sc-fi is supposed to prepare us for the future, but no one gave the script to the robot creators.

The Terminator came out nearly 30 years ago. It lit the warning flare for a whole generation: artificial intelligence (machines, computers, robots, etc etc) will become self aware and will attempt to obliterate mankind. In the movie, this was done by Skynet, a high-powered war machine. Just as Star Trek has pushed us toward a more egalitarian society, the Terminator franchise has subconsciously tried to prepare us to battle human-hating robots.
 
And it’s been effective.
 
Take Japan’s repeated efforts to create companion robots, such as this nurse robot from Koroko robotics company:
 
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Creepy, right? Can’t you imagine her peeling off that fake skin and shooting you down with red glowing eyes? Something like this Arnold Schwarzenegger metallic monster:
 
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Now those “geniuses” at Boston Dynamics are fouling it all up. They’ve created a vicious robot that looks like… a galloping, headless goat/horse/metal hybrid, both fast and clumsy at the same time. Vicious. Silly. Unpredictable. Death bringers all the same.
 
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Watch this video and you will realize how confused and ill prepared you will be when this robot is hunting you down.
 
 
 
Nope. We only know how to fight humanoid, Schwarzeneggeresque robots. Not these crazy things.

Read this book: The Man From Berlin

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The scariest monsters, it turns out, are all too human.

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My Friend Luke McCallin‘s great book The Man From Berlin is a historical thriller set in Nazi-occupied Sarajevo. It’s a page-turner, ideal for anyone who loves reading about other times and places. McCallin creates (or re-creates) a time period with mesmerizing detail.

But part of me was hesitant to read it. Why? The protagonist, Gregor Reinhardt, is an officer in the German army. When I read I like to try and identify with the main character. I didn’t want to identify with a Nazi. Luke reminded me that not everyone in the German army during World War II was a Nazi.

Okay.

That distinction wasn’t fine enough for me (and I’m still borderline). Lucky for me I got past this hesitation, because McCallin very subtly walks Reinhardt through the Nazi house of horrors. In the beginning, Reinhardt compartmentalizes: he’s a German soldier, separate from the Nazis. By the end, Reinhardt’s eyes are opened and he sees, like it or not, that he is playing a part in the evil the Nazis are perpetrating, even if his own hands aren’t bloody.

What is common knowledge for all of us – the atrocities committed – is new learning for Reinhardt, and through his eyes we come face to face with the scariest monsters of all, and they aren’t the demonic type. They are not vampires or werewolves or aliens. They’re human.

Take the character of Marija. The novel opens with Reinhardt being assigned to investigate her murder. She’s Croatian, but she collaborates with the Nazis, cataloging, observing, maybe even participating, in their horrors with creepy glee. Now, I have some doubts about whether she was as evil as depicted – she’s only described by others; we never actually see her in action. There’s a chance she was a scapegoat for others with their own agendas. Maybe. But it’s hard to read her as anything but a gorgeous monster.

I love to write about ghosts and monsters. The Last Conquistador stars a demon wreaking havoc on the life of a young Army soldier. But what I write is pure escapism – it’s safe to live in an imaginary world of ghosts and demons and vampires. It’s much harder to look head-on at the evil and danger that exists in this world, which is probably why we love roller coasters and monster movies.

Saturday fun with Doctor Who

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Here’s a Doctor Who webisode I stumbled across. The Doctor (played by Matt Smith) and his wife, River Song (Alex Kingston), are out on a date gone awry. It’s a short clip, written by none other than Neil Gaiman. For those who have never watched this British classic series, this gives you a glimpse of what the Whoniverse is like (heavy on characterization, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, other times deadly serious).

Waiting impatiently for the Doctor’s return in November…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORR-SY0KskM

 

The chimera in the mirror

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Mashed-up mutants aren’t only the stuff of legend and fiction.

Imagine a creature that’s part lion, part eagle and part snake, a creature that breathes fire, a bad-ass scourge. One that looks like this:

 

Chimera_by_josh_buchanan

It’s called a Chimera, and it exists only in ancient Greek mythology. It’s not the only hybrid creature in literature and pop culture.

There’s also the Griffin, also Greek, a lion/eagle mix.

Griffin

These creatures, imaginary as they are, are genetic abnormalities. They are not supposed to exist in nature, mythological metaphors to serve some higher literary purpose. In Left Among the Mutants I wrote about mutating animals (and humans) as a way to convey change, loss and grief.

But it turns out that, to some degree, many of us are freaks of nature. We may all be a little monstrous.

The New York Times published an article that suggests that many humans harbor cells with completely different genetic codes. Theoretically each one of our cells should have the same genetic codes. Not so.

For example:

–A British woman donated blood, and the cells were a mix of Type O and Type A. People are supposed to be only one blood type. Scientists concluded she absorbed cells from her twin brother

–Another woman gave birth to children who were not genetically hers. Doctors say that she originated from 2 separate genomes; some of the other genome gave rise to the eggs of 2 of her 3 children

–In one study, more than half of women had cells with the Y chromosome in their breast tissue. Women aren’t supposed to carry the Y chromosome at all – the Y is men only

Note that this is called chimerism, courtesy of that lion/eagle/snake creature.

How does all this happen? Scientists are just beginning to explore this question. What we do know-at this very early stage-is that we may not be who we think we are. We may be others as well.

Aside from the scientific implications, what could this mean for literature? Movies? TV?

Come on, writers, there’s a whole mountain of possibilities waiting to be mined.

Watch this movie: Attack the Block

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British horror done right…

 
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The British are known for many things: great music, bad food and teeth, and their one-time love of controlling the planet. But they’re not as well known for horror movies. Maybe this is good: they have little to prove, so there’s no pressure.

Case in point: two of the best horror movies of the past decade: 28 Days Later, a zombie-ish movie that starred Irish actor Cillian Murphy, and one of the coolest, underrated, most bad-ass and too-short-lived doctors from Doctor Who, Christopher Eccleston. It’s a hard-edged, smash-bang-fun time. Whatever you do, avoid the sequel (which shall remain nameless), as it nearly ruined the whole thing.

The second film is a horror/comedy, Shaun of the Dead, with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Couple dry British humor with gore and you have a classic. 

And then there’s Attack the Block, a low budget (I’m assuming) indie-style horror. Why low budget? Well, the monsters are kind of… rough. And the movie features the classic horror fail: the empty city streets. 

Get over it. I did, and it was worth it.

So here’s the plot in a nutshell, ripped straight from IMDB: a teen gang in South London protect their block from an alien invasion. There you go.

First, it’s great fun. The action starts pretty early, and once it starts, it rolls along, not too slow, not too fast. It lies somewhere between 28 Days Later (super serious) and Shaun of the Dead (tongue-in-cheek), though more toward the 28 Days Later end of the horror spectrum.

What stood out for me, most of all, was the unique set-up. You meet the teenage hero, Moses, as he, along with his juvy gang, are mugging Sam, a nurse on her walk home. Moses is cruel, someone who you would not choose to identify with, but over the course of the movie, he morphs into the hero of the story, in part because the other characters (drug dealers, vicious aliens) are so much worse, and in part because the extreme situation he finds himself in (battling aliens), forces him to grow as a person.

Rent this movie. It’s worth it, not just because it’s fun, but because it’s a great example of the anti-hero in drama, and it also shows another of my favorite literary conceits: the ordinary man (men and women in this case) forced to confront extraordinary circumstances. None of these people are Jason Bourne or James Bond, and their fight scenes reflect that, which makes it all the better. 

 

Want to kill Hitler? Good luck with that

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Attention time travelers, killing Hitler, while noble, may not be as easy as it sounds.
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One of my favorite web sites, io9.com, compiled several literary/TV attempts to kill Hitler, and the results are not particularly encouraging.

In a nutshell, all the literary/TV tries either 1) fail miserably due to the bumblings of the time traveler, 2) end up working, only leading to an even worse outcome, or 3) actually CAUSE Hitler and WWII as we know it.

Now, I wasn’t aware that this was such a common trope. I’ve seen the Doctor Who episode, Let’s Kill Hitler, which actually had little to do with the big bad himself, and was more about developing one of my favorite Who characters, River Song (for a good intro to all things Who, watch the two-parter Silence in the Library). Hitler was quickly forgotten in the first ten minutes or so.

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And I remember watching one of the items on io9’s list – the Twilight Zone episode (in full here) where Katherine Heigl (!) time travels to visit baby Hitler. She’s not there for a friendly visit, and not to give it away, but history incorporates her mission with no noticeable change in the timeline.

Several of the other books/stories/etc on the list are intriguing, and worth a look. Read this clever short story here, in its entirety.

The moral of this story?

Time travel as a dramatic device is great for one reason – there are endless permutations and possibilities. One simple concept – killing Hitler – can be spun in countless entertaining ways. As long as it’s well executed, it will work.