THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, or THE HORROR RITUAL

The English words "rhythm" and "ritual" share the same common ancestor, which makes sense when you stop to think about it. They both go back to an Indo-European root that meant "to count," or "to number," which also shows up in "arithmetic" and suggests the idea of imposing order or pattern on the universe. Our rituals are a rhythm as sure as any heartbeat; they bring a sense of structure to our lives.

Which brings me to the teenage slasher movie.

If that segue just gave you whiplash, then you probably haven't seen The Cabin in the Woods yet, and you probably should stop reading now if you have any intention to see it, because there are spoilers ahead. I think I wanted to love this movie; it was written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (directed by Goddard as well), whose work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel constituted some of the best television ever. And on one level I did love it, but on another it all seems to crash and burn because like Icarus it just got too clever for itself.

The teenage slasher movie is just the modern incarnation of "The Tale of the Hook," its immediate ancestor. You know the one I am talking about. It goes something like this; a young couple drives out to lover's lane and parks the car, hears on the radio that an escaped psychopath with a hook for a hand is roaming about, but unwisely stays to make out anyway. They hear a noise, and in some versions he goes out to investigate and gets killed and in others they speed off just in time, only to find a hook hanging on the passenger side door. This Hook Man is horror's dead beat dad, having fathered Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers and Leatherface only to then abandon them to follow their own murderous careers.

The point is we all know the story the moment it begins. We've all experienced it at some point in our adolescence because the Teenage Slasher Film is a ritual just as sure and familiar as getting your driver's license, graduation, or losing your virginity. In ancient times societies would have called it an ordeal, a ritual you must undergo to test you before you pass into adulthood.

If you are a fan of the genre, or far worse a lunatic like me who happens to believe horror is important and worthy of study, then you know all the rules as surely as the characters in Scream. Rule One requires a group of teenagers...but not just any teenagers, they must conform to certain archetypes, like trumps in a Tarot Hand. You need the Jock, the Bad Girl, the Good Girl, the Nice Guy, and the Joker (or Nerd). Rule Two is that you must isolate them. Rule Three is that there must be some sort of Transgression...the kids must do something to bring it all on themselves. Rule Four is that the Hook shows up and starts killing them (the Bad Girl always goes first and usually right after having premarital sex, the naughty whore). Rule Five is that someone--probably the Good Girl--survives to tell the tale. Make no mistake, all of this is a ritual as surely as Mass on Sundays.

But a ritual to appease what gods?

*MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD*

Goddard and Whedon have that answer for you, in this film. Like any slasher film our five teens leave school behind to go off for the weekend to a cabin in the woods...but almost we are made aware that some massive government secret agency is tracking them and manipulating them. Beneath this cabin is a high tech spy complex from which they watch the teens' every move and play with them like chess pieces, forcing them to conform to the ritual of the teenage slasher film. They watch as teen after teen is horribly murdered on hidden camera and cheer them on. The punchline of course is that their are Lovecraftian dark gods sleeping in the Earth, and this annual ritual sacrifice of young people is required to keep them from waking and destroying the Earth.

It's clever. Very clever. And that's the problem.

See, the message is that the Teenage Slasher Film is a sacrifice performed for our benefit, the audience. We are the dark gods that must be appeased and there is the subtle implication that somehow things like horror films are releases valves that let off some of the pressure inside of us so we don't explode and start rampaging. There may be some truth to this...after all horror is a form of exorcism. But it all came off as too self-aware, too proud of itself, to really please me. I am one of those people who firmly believes that horror is this sort of ritual offering, but the suspension of disbelief is a key element of that working, and the film lost me in the final act.

As I said, I love Whedon and I like Goddard, but both have done this kind of post-modern deconstruction of the horror film far better before. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the textbook case, with most of the same archetypes but this time the teens killed the monsters. The Cabin in the Woods, despite moments of brilliance, doesn't live up to its own potential.

But don't let this get you down. Just as there will be Christmas next year or the Fourth of July, there will be fresh horror films where the ritual is repeated and the black gods appeased.

SHERLOCK SQUARED

Sherlock Holmes belongs to a fairly exclusive club, one occupied by other august (and Victorian) personages like Tarzan and Count Dracula. He is, simply, one of the most played, most adapted, most revised, most re-invented figures in fiction. According to Guinness, he's been portrayed by 75 actors in 211 films. This doesn't take into account stage or television.

These days we have at least three major incarnations of Holmes in play; well, two-and-a-half at least. We have Guy Ritchie's absurd over-the-top action Holmes, played by Robert Downey Jr. We have Hugh Laurie's House, who qualifies as the "half Holmes." This tale of a drug-addicted, interpersonal-relationship challenged mystery-solving genius was clearly inspired by Conan Doyle's detective, even in name ("Holmes" becomes "House," "Watson" becomes "Wilson"). But clearly the best of the bunch is the BBC's wunderkind, which despite consisting of only a handful of 90-minute episodes stretched over two seasons (or "series," to be British about it) is the best Holmes you've seen since Jeremy Brett.

Sherlock is a modern retelling of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Think Holmes and Watson in the 21st century and you've got it. We've seen adaptations of this kind before--the whackiest by far being 1987's dreadful The Return of Sherlock Holmes, where the great detective is thawed out after a century in cryogenic sleep (an idea so stupid it was recycled again in 1994 in Sherlock Holmes Returns). Sherlock is different. It doesn't bring Holmes and Watson into the present, it portrays them as belonging here.

Watson, played to perfection by The Office alumnus and soon-to-be-Bilbo-Baggins Martin Freeman, is an Afghan war veteran suffering PTSD. Encouraged to blog about the war and his recovery by his therapist, he ends up encountering the eccentric Holmes and blogging all about him instead, turning him into a kind of pop culture icon. This is a smart update of the tradition John Watson, an Army doctor who turned Holmes into a celebrity by writing about him. Freeman's portrayal manages to remain very faithful to Conan Doyle while at the same time giving Watson modern context and issues. He has precisely the right blend of exasperation, hero-worship, and protectiveness of Holmes that made the character the original Samwise Gamgee (couldn't resist another hobbit reference).

But the show is called Sherlock, and what sinks or swims any adaptation is the actor who takes on Holmes. This time it is the improbably named Benedict Cumberbatch, whose take on this played-to-death character is so freaking good you can't take your eyes off of it.

Cumberbatch's Holmes is a faithful incarnation; he is a genius whose racing mind never slows down, and unless has an impossible puzzle to work on starts tearing itself apart. The more negative aspects of the character are accentuated. Always a bit aloof and arrogant, this Holmes is so inside his own head he barely acknowledges the existence of other people. Like Hugh Laurie's House he is so charm-free that he's charming. Somehow.

The stories themselves are loose adaptations of Conan Doyle, again, brilliantly done. Series creator and writer Steven Moffat--who knows all about brilliant reinventions of characters after his smashing version of Doctor Who--excellently keeps the mysteries fresh with enough winks and nods to the Holmes tradition to keep devoted fans tickled. Case in point, his handling of the famous deerstalker cap, a piece of headgear we all associate with Holmes that he never actually wore. In Moffat's hands Holmes grabs the cap to quickly disguise himself, but is photographed in it and made such a celebrity in Watson's blog that the public (to his fury) immediately identifies him with it. This is just one of many touches that make the series excellent.

It is this triple blow of two wonderful lead actors and superb writing that make Sherlock must-see television, whether you're a Conan Doyle fan or not. In a world where Holmes has been played to death by a long line of leading actors, turned into Japanese anime, and even been portrayed by Kermit the Frog, the BBC's current revision is shockingly fresh.

FEVRE DREAM

I don't think anyone thinks of George R.R. Martin as a "horror writer." With the immense success of his "A Song of Ice and Fire" series the marketing machine usually labels him something like "the Master of Modern Fantasy" or whatnot instead. But Martin is the kind of writer I very much admire, who catches the scent of a story like a bloodhound and chases it down no matter what genre the trail leads through. He's written some excellent fantasy, but he's also written damn fine superhero fiction and a few gripping horror stories. One of those was "The Skin Trade," a novella about werewolves. Another was 1982's "Fevre Dream."

"Fevre Dream" wears yet another label, that of the "vampire novel," a term I rather dislike. Given the immense diversity of books that get pegged with it, it's just about as meaningless a label as saying something is a "human novel." If you really want to classify a hardcore horror story like King's "Salem's Lot" with Meyer's multi-volume "good girls wait until marriage" sermon "Twilight," be my guest, but the two have practically nothing in common. You might as well put "Cujo" in the same category as Armstrong's "Sounder" under the heading of "dog tales."

I mention all of this because "Fevre Dream" is too rich to be filed under any one single label. Yes, it has vampires in it, but it is also a well-researched tale of mid-19th century steamboat life on the Mississippi (and yet curiously is not labelled "steamboat fiction"). It concerns captain Abner Marsh, whose fleet of boats is wiped out by a freakishly harsh winter. He is saved by entering a partnership with the enigmatic Joshua York, a pale and elegant gentleman with a fortune to spend. York finances construction of the Fevre Dream, one of the largest, fastest, and most elegant steamboats on the river. But this comes with a price. He wishes to be co-captain with Marsh, to live aboard the ship, to transport a strange menagerie of curious guests no questions asked, and demands frequent stops along the river without explanation. Marsh's suspicions build as they steam down from St Louis towards New Orleans. After all, York is never seen by day, drinks bottles of some strange elixir, and is obsessed with newspaper articles of unsolved murder. By the time Marsh confronts him, the reader is already certain what York is.

The reader is wrong, however.

Without giving too much away Martin does here for vampires what he (and his friends) did for superheroes in "Wild Cards," and in many ways what he did again in his "A Song of Ice and Fire" series. He takes a genre you think you know, dismantles it, and puts it back together again in a whole new way. Not that his approach to vampires is all that unique; Suzy McKee Charnas and Whitley Streiber both beat him to it (see "The Unicorn Tapestry" and "The Hunger"), but the way he handles this sort of...ahem..."vampire" is very well done indeed. I would also add that it is entirely secondary to the novel. The engine that moves "Fevre Dream" along is Martin's engaging characters and plot twists. Though not very scary, it is a gripping page-turner. It also is a book with something to say, nicely comparing the master-slave dynamic of the period with the vampire-prey one.

REVISITING THE X-MEN

It's easy to dismiss comic books. Certainly as I was growing up, they were seen as a childish form of entertainment best grown out of quickly. If you were ten and reading comics, nothing was amiss. If you were twenty and still reading them, you could expect some eye-rolling at your expense. And this attitude was reflected in how other forms of media treated comic books. Saturday morning cartoon versions took comic book stories and characters and wrote them "down" for an even younger audience, and the few stabs made at them in cinema and television were "camped up" to make them palatable for adults, as if the material was too light weight to be treated seriously. But all of this began to change, and change in a big way, at the turn of the 20th century, largely thanks to the cinema adaptation of one of the best-selling comics in American history; Marvel Comics' X-Men. The success of the first X-Men film in 2000 was instrumental in Hollywood's modern love affair with the comic book, showing that if the material was treated with respect, and presented by top-notch writers, directors, and actors, then comic book adaptations had powerful stories to tell. Stories even adults could appreciate.

The X-Men were a perfect place for Hollywood to start. For those who aren't familiar with the series, the X-Men comic appeared in 1963 and has been running, continually, for nearly fifty years. It centers around the idea of "mutants," human beings who carry a gene which produces some sort of mutation that usually erupts and expresses itself during adolescence. These mutations grant some sort of super-power--the ability to read minds, walk through walls, or fly--but are often uncontrollable, come with a side-effect, or cause a disfiguring transformation in the individual's appearance. Mutants are a very small percentage of the population, but are widely hated and feared for a variety of reasons. They might look freakish, be a danger to themselves and others, or just be so "different" as to make others uncomfortable. There are also uncomfortable implications surrounding them...as homo sapiens came along and replaced Neanderthal man, many believe that the mutants (or "homo superior") are here to replace man.

From the very start, the X-Men saga blended comic book action with very real social issues. Appearing in the civil rights era, over the decades the mutants would be used to explore racism, the treatment of minorities in society, and even gay and lesbian issues. Mutants were the subject of military experiments, used as slave labor in foreign countries, and even targeted to be rounded up, labeled, and detained by conservative politicians in the United States. Most were forced into hiding, with mutant adolescents running away from home or hiding in "the closet."

In response, two opposing poles or forces arose. One was Professor Charles Xavier, a mutant who believed humans and mutant kind could peacefully co-exist. His opponent (and old friend) was Eric Lensherr, better known by his name Magneto. A Jew who had watched his family die in Nazi concentration camps, Eric had seen first hand how humanity treats minorities, and believed that co-existence would never be possible. Magneto formed a team of mutant terrorists to apply force to human society and push for mutant rights. Appalled by his violent methods, Xavier formed his own team, the X-Men, to oppose them.

In those early years, Xavier and Magneto reflected the approaches to African American civil rights as championed by Dr. King and Malcolm X, but as the decades passed the X-Men continually introduced new story lines to comment on current affairs. While the world watched South Africa struggle with Apartheid, the comic created the South African nation of Genosha, which became a global power built on a mutant slave class. When AIDS first appeared and fire-breathing pastors called it a "gay plague," the comic introduced the Legacy virus, a disease that killed mutants. In 1982 they made waves with "God Loves, Man Kills," a story about a minister preaching against mutants and a commentary on growing religious intolerance. Even the movies continued this theme. In the midst of the American debates on homosexuality and whether or not it could be cured, the third film created a plot of the government devising a cure for mutation. As a gay man, when a young mutant character asks "Is it true, they can cure us now?", and older mutant leader Storm replies "No they can't cure you because there is nothing wrong with you," I nearly stood up and cheered.

The X-Men are on my mind again because I recently started reading Ultimate X-Men, a series that ran from 2001 to 2009 and is conveniently available in 20 trade paperback editions (check out the first volume here). Catching up with fifty years of storylines and characters is daunting for newcomers, so Ultimate X-Men was a "reboot" of the story, modernizing and condensing what had gone before. It is a different take on the characters, and there are enough twists that a long-time fan will find new surprises, but it is ideal for new readers to enjoy the X-Men and get a taste of what the comic is all about.

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'SALEM'S LOT

Baby mama drama's screamin' on and too much for me to wanna

Stay in one spot, another day of monotony's

Gotten me to the point I'm like a snail

I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot

Success is my only mothaf****n' option, failure's not

Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got to go

I cannot grow old in Salem's lot

- Eminem, Lose Yourself

I grew up in 'Salem's Lot. Many Americans did. The town that is the titular character in Stephen King's second published novel is instantly recognizable to millions of us. It's a dead little place. Nothing ever happens there. Everyone knows everyone, and it is so safe you can leave the keys in the ignition of your pick-up truck at night. If you live there, you probably don't even have a lock on your front door. After all, the crime rate is just about zero. Because 'Salem's Lot doesn't know the inflated and grotesque evils of the big city; its evils are all the small and whimpering kind. The neighbor's wife cheating with the postman. The guy who smacks his girlfriend around. The kids who shoplift at the dime store. But there hasn't been a murder in years, and everyone knows nothing really evil could ever happen there. Just the monotonous and banal evils that slowly bleed you dry like a million paper cuts.

"...The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face..."

When horror works, and it works extraordinarily well in 'Salem's Lot, it does so because it makes us uncomfortable with ourselves. In deciding to rewrite Dracula for the 20th century, King understood this perfectly. Stoker's novel worked because it preyed on all sorts of things the late Victorians felt uneasy about, from the dark and Dionysian sexuality underlying proper Apollonian England to fears of foreign powers rising from the East. All King does is import Count Dracula to rural America from late Victorian London, and the effect is chillingly the same. All the lesser evils--the teenage mothers getting knocked up young and taking it out on their kids, the alcoholic priests, the crooked real estate men, the cheating wives, the bullied disabled man--get sucked up into the ensuing vampiric whirlwind and transformed. Vampires don't cast reflections, but 'Salem's Lot makes us squirm because it turns the mirror on us. Like Eminem says in the song, he can't grow old in 'Salem's Lot. He's desperate to escape and become something more. And that is what the vampires in King's novel feed on, far more than blood. They drink up that quiet desperation, that ennui. With their cold dead smiles they seem to say "you will never need to worry about growing old here again."

"...Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route-12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place..."

King makes several references in 'Salem's Lot to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a book that deeply influenced him. No where is that more clear than in the way he characterizes Small Town, USA. 'Salem's Lot is the geographic incarnation of Jackson's protagonist, Eleanor Vance, a deeply conservative and self-obsessed woman who secretly longs for something, anything, to "happen" to her. It finally does; she encounters Hill House and allows it to seduce her. The small Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot just about does the same with its vampires...creatures that of course have to be invited in. There is a grim undercurrent running through the novel that the town is pleased something interesting is finally happening to them. And even when you love your little town, there is always that desire under the surface.

"...No one pronounced Jerusalem's Lot dead on the morning of October 6; no one knew it was. Like the bodies of the previous days, it retained every semblance of life..."

It's this quality, this deep and intimate awareness of Americana--and especially small town "folksy" Americana--that puts King in a different class from his competitors. Sure, he has a tendency to go "too far" at times, even to get slightly clownish, but few other readers tap the American subconscious as well as he does. It doesn't always work for me--Christine was just a bit too American Graffiti with ghosts--but when King nails it he is the envy of a thousand other writers, myself included. And this quality speaks to those of us who know 'Salem's Lot, who grew up there. By the same token, when I hear King's critics, I can't help but wonder if they are from suburbia or the city.

THE STEPHEN KING DEBATE

I haven't gotten around to talking about King yet. I will. Suffice it to say that I think 'Salem's Lot is one of the best damn horror novels of the 20th century. But a pair of authors over at Salon.com caught my attention, and I wanted to post some links here.

The first is the Dwight Allen piece, "My Stephen King Problem." This was precisely the sort of self-important literati piece that makes my head want to explode. I was so irritated about it that I was preparing a counter-piece, until I found Erik Nelson's response, "Stephen King: You Can Be Popular and Good." Nelson said mainly what I had planned to, so I will simply refer you, oh gentle reader, to these articles. I will have a few words of my own on King to say later.

A MESSAGE FROM MS. SUMMERS...

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