Another old gem

Recently I got another of those urges to to revisit one of the old movies that stuck in my head when I was younger. These are the films that I watched either lying in my bed with the lights off some night during the summer or the weekend when I could stay up as late as I wanted, or sitting on my mom's bed on a Saturday morning taking advantage of her larger TV while she was at work. During those years I probably watched hundreds of movies, ranging from the high-quality, professionally made ones to the films where you could see the actors standing there, waiting for their opponent to throw a punch or kick so they could scream 'Ugh!” with Shakespearean passion.

In that odd mix, a certain group has always had its own special place. They're not only horror movies, but they have a certain flavor and style that comes from being made in England by Hammer and other companies that knew what they were doing. This is where I got a lot of the images and situations that eventually gelled into the protoplasm that I pull my ideas from. This is the stuff that nightmares are made from.

'The blood on Satan's Claw,' from what I've read, came from trying to follow up on the success of 'Witchfinder General.' It takes place in an isolated country village, where an innocent/naive farmer plows up an inhuman set of bones. From there, the whole village is affected by something that we never get a good look at, and in ways that are more subtle than you will see in most other movies, past or present.

Not having seen it in many years, when I sat to down and watched it last week, it was all the details that made it stand out. Aside from good acting, there are subtleties that make it feel bigger and richer than its contemporaries. The evil corrupts the young people in the village, and they seem to take to their new lives with wicked enthusiasm, with passion that everyone else lacks. The local reverend loses control of the children in his Bible class, and ends up reviled and accused of murder. The only adults we see as part of the unrest are the truly old, part of an age that this bright, shining country worked hard to bury, and is working harder to forget. There are references to England splitting from Catholicism and creating their own church, as well as to generation gaps and the slow struggle out of the dark ages. We get the sense of larger events that overshadow the villagers and their problems. If they die, and darkness takes them and everything they know, it's doubtful anyone in the outside world would even notice.

All that in ninety-seven minutes, made back in nineteen seventy one. They didn't have CGI, or digital watches, or Pac Man. Star Wars had not yet come out, and Elvis was still alive. They just had film, actors, and a script.

That's writing.

If you take the wrong road ---

Then it might not be a good idea to turn into the trees and tear a hole through the woods as you get back to the one you want. Claudia and I saw the new Riddick movie last week, and in the first few minutes they addressed a rather large pachyderm that was standing in the corner. The movie has our hero on his own again, without the female sidekick/love interest that Riddick never showed any love for because that would compromise his machismo.

(I'm not being sarcastic on that last point. If it's believable, not showing romantic feelings can be a really powerful component of characterization.)

But also absent from any contribution to the action are the million or so followers that our hero had acquired in the last film. That, as James Perfoy once said, is where the onion is.

They show us a quick flashback where our hero is trying to find his home planet, and the treacherous SOB from the previous film tricks him into going down to a desolate world and arranges an ambush. Riddick survives, but is not pursued because his attackers think he's dead. Now we can get on with the story we wanted to tell. Does it work?

Well, maybe. According to everything my psychic powers and the mighty internet tell me, there was a consensus that Riddick needed to be on his own for this new sequel. There's a reason my wife calls the Riddick movies 'Conan in space.' The similarities are many and obvious, and both heroes share the same type of appeal. They are inhumanly strong, deceptively cunning, and always do more good than they do harm. Both are incarnations of the same archetype, and a heavy component of that archetype is independence. Who does Conan/Riddick need? No one. Period. They'll spend some time with people that they can tolerate, and are quick to form alliances of necessity with good guys and bad guys. But at the end of the story, they're on their way to the next planet or town, and we already know that if they can't find some fresh trouble, they'll make some. Note that Riddick is a bit darker than our favorite Cimmerian. We never see him carousing in a bar, buying beer for his fellows and singing obscene ballads, and he doesn't hesitate to scare someone, male or female, if he thinks they deserve it. This may be due to the fact that Riddick is a more modern character, needing to build on R. E. Howard's legacy instead of just copying it.

Which might be exactly where the onion is. Howard only wrote a few tales in which Conan had won himself a crown, and if memory serves, most of them involve him needing to leave the palace either to defend his kingdom or because it's been stolen from him. Someone out on their own making their own place in the world has more appeal to us than a guy in a huge castle with swords, gold, and women at his disposal. So yes, a change of address for Mr. Diesel's character was in order.

But doing it all at once, taking the whole mass of people, firepower, and ships out of the equation in one big Whoosh, stretches disbelief. Was there no ally among them at all? How about some self-serving toady who knows that if this particular treacherous SOB takes over, he's going to get a one-way trip out the nearest airlock? Some blindly loyal, new member of the guard? No one?

So in a perfect world, it would still happen, but not exactly as we see it. Maybe a revolt, that our hero may or may not have seen coming. If he didn't really trust them, it would have a nice way of disorganizing them.

By the way, if I haven't said so before or recently enough, these little critiques aren't my way of shooting down other people's works. I write, and the point of looking at movies, books, and stories that are out in the world is to see what people watch and read, so that I get a sense of what has already been done, so I can write my own stories instead of copying others'. When I point out what I see as flaws, it's so I don't write something, let it sit while I go around thinking I've got the next Stoker award sewn up, then go back and read it and scream, “Oh hell, what did I do here?”

It's so I can write the absolute best stories that I am capable of.

What would they do if...

Hey there! Good to see you again. Let me introduce you to a couple of people. This is Dale. He works out at the beef-packing plant as the loading dock supervisor. He's been working at that place for over thirty years, at first to support his mother and sister, and then later his wife and son. He's not quite as content with that fact as he used to be.

And this is Frank, a deputy with the local sheriff's office. Back when he first joined the department, one seriously evil SOB was running it. But he stuck to his guns, even though it cost him his marriage. Now he wants to be sheriff.

Whats going to happen to them? Well, that depends on you and me.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it's more important that you know your characters during the rewrite than when writing the first draft. On your first trip through the story, you're seeing the big picture, and making sure the ground under your feet is solid. The characters are there to prop up the plot. Whereas you and I (unless the Rutan are reading this) get our structural support from our skeletons, these folks start with what they contribute to our tale. If you took a close look at them the first time they get mentioned, they would probably look like wax statues, not even shaped into good detail on the back. They don't have any life of their own at that point.

On the second pass, they need more life. We're not just appreciating the scenery at that point, we're taking note of how clear the path is, whether the plants look green or brown, and if the area smells like rainforest or store-bought fertilizer. Assuming you're writing something that you want people to read, you better make it a worthwhile investment of their time. If you say the mailman did it on page 483, say it was done with a knife on page 101, and say the mailman faints at the sight of blood on page 257, someone's going to notice. Heck, some people will notice if you misspell one word out of a hundred thousand. People are like that. (See an older entry about writing or filming crap)

What will they do if you get it wrong? Depends. If you're Stephen King, and you put an electric chair in a novel set a few years before they were actually used, every amateur critic and rabid fan in the civilized world will take to the internet and froth at the mouth over it, and it won't affect your sales one bit. If, on the other hand, you're an unknown, and you write 'cleaver' when you mean 'clever,' or worse, you miss-type it and your autocorrect changes it to the former, the editor may well throw your story in the trash, and you'll only get a form letter with 'not what we're looking for at this time' pre-printed on it.

So think about those characters. Wait until you have the story set in your head and the frame of it on paper first, but try this thought in particular: What would they do if you didn't use them as cannon-fodder? If the martians didn't land, or the dead stayed content and quiet in their graves, or that little piece of a deadly crystal didn't show up at just the right time, what would those people do on what would otherwise be the opening day of your story? As far as the two men you met a few paragraphs ago, Dale would get a little more bitter, just as he did yesterday, and the day before that. His birthday's coming up, you see, and he hasn't lived quite as much as he expected he would have at his age. What about Frank? Well, I told you he wants to be sheriff. I might have glossed over the fact that he's already run once, and that he actually held the office for a short while under less than ideal circumstances. He already has a firm picture in his head about how the people in town feel about him, and he tends to ignore anything that contradicts that image. Frank won't be disillusioned any time in the immediate future. He'll just go about his business, being wrong about some very fundamental facts.

But of course, we know what's really going to happen. We've known all along. But also knowing what they might do if they existed without us lets us plot their actions a little more consistently, and it makes them a little more sympathetic to us, which helps us make them more sympathetic to everyone else.

Speaking of which, could I ask for a bit of sympathy? I went through all that chest-puffing last week about how The Red Man Burning was going to be my next book, but between then and now I pulled up that other one I mentioned, In The Dark, and used the word count function. It pulls up at around 43,000 words. At that length I might as well fatten it up and serve it with some flourish. Dress warmly if you read it. It's a bit cold out there in the dark.

Still writing.

On Crap

If you read, watch, or listen to horror, you're going to discover a basic truth: There's a lot of crap out there. It's true for other genres as well, but we're talking about horror, so smear some vapor rub under your nose and put on your waders. It gets pretty deep in here.

I just watched a movie on Netflix that billed itself as horror, and it inspired the title of this piece. I debated for a while whether or not to tell the title of the film, and I've just decided to give the relevant details, and if you can figure out which one I'm talking about, well, you've earned the warning to avoid it.

Disclaimer: Have I written crap? Oh hell yes. Will you ever read it? Not if I can help it. If you've ever read anything of mine that was crap, please send me an e-mail and we can arrange to meet somewhere along a dark, deserted stretch of road. If you can bring your own duct tape, plastic bags, and hacksaw, that would be ideal.

Now just as crap is unavoidable, in producing as well as consuming, it has a function. When you write something that stinks and oozes, you better have the ability to recognize it, and either flush it and learn from the experience, or break it down to it's raw elements and start over. If you can't recognize it, rest assured someone out there can, and they will not be shy about informing you. When you read or watch crap, you can tell what it is pretty quickly. Then, if you have the itch, you start noticing specifics. In the movie, Daniel Baldwin does a good job acting, but his character is one dimensional. All he is, is a really sadistic murderer. That's it. Good villains, on the other hand, are worth watching because they're interesting. Jigsaw has a code he follows, and he's a murderous psycho because he lost his unborn child and was given a death sentence by brain cancer. Hannibal Lecter is smarter than we are, has those creepy abilities to manipulate other people and to accurately predict what they'll do in important situations, and lived through a horrific childhood. These plot points make us envy and empathize with the villains. We make up little details about them in our head that are never mentioned in the book/movie. We say to ourselves, 'If I had that ability, I know exactly what I'd do with it.' Our movie villain is a murderous bully, and he's lucky. He gives us no hint of being a genius, and he NEVER makes a mistake.

Watch your foot. I think my disbelief is going to fall there.

The two protagonists would have to have an extra hour of screentime, each, in order to work their way up to being one-dimensional. We have a jaded cop, and an optimistic shrink, and that's all that they are. The emphasis here is on the victims, and to be fair the women deliver decent performances. But when the credits rolled, I wanted my hour and a half back. There was no point. Almost nothing changed, and the only thing that did, only made matters worse. I will admit that the later 'Saw' movies have this same problem, too, so I can understand people who make a claim to them getting labeled as crap. But I dare you to stick that label on the original, and then defend that viewpoint.

That's the difference. Good writing, whether it ends up in print or on a screen, tells a story. There is progression, whether for good or ill, but it has a pace, and a plot. I can sum up this movie by saying, 'Sadistic murderer tortures and murders some pretty women.' Except for the gory details, that's the whole story, which is no story.

That's crap.

I finished 'Blood' on Wednesday, and on Friday I started 'A Room'. I'm really excited about the latter, as I've had it bouncing around in my head for a long time now.

I'm trying out a new technique for these entries, writing them on an Open Office document and copying and pasting them in. This way I'll have a record in case Google swallows my blog and refuses to spit it back up, and I can write these earlier if I get an idea. Hopefully, that will prevent me from being late again.

Still writing.