It's the Video Nasties Blog, Kids!

No one got overexcited about this at all...

Video Nasties.  The term sends chills down the spine, doesn’t it?  Even if you don’t know exactly what it means, it’s evocative.  It’s both sinister and utterly fucking absurd.  Which is pretty much where the Video Nasties situation lives as an historical event.

I’ve been fascinated with the whole business in one form or another pretty much since it happened.  I was aware of some of the most famous films when I was very young.  I discovered what happened and the list of films when I was fourteen or fifteen after picking up my first issue of the British horror magazine The Dark Side.

Some fond memories here.

Okay, that’s a tiny bit of interesting background, but why am I talking about this?  Well, from the middle of 2020 to the start of 2021 (last year to this year for current-me) I watched a bunch of Video Nasties that are on Amazon Prime.  I’ve idly thought that I should have filled my blog with thoughts on each film on an individual basis as I watched.  This isn’t how it panned out, so we’re here.  I didn’t find every Video Nasty, not by a long shout, but I filled in some holes in my watching.  A few things have been percolating in my brain since watching the last one, that I thought would be fun to share.

Hopefully more fun than watching the films.  Aye, it’s like that.

What this means, of course, that while I’m not going to go into deep detail on the plots of these films, really I’m just vaguely acknowledging their plots – fuck, some of them barely have plots to acknowledge – some of what I’m going to say will probably be able to be pieced together to work out story elements.  It’s spoilers.  I wanted to say it in a different way, but there are likely to be spoilers for these films.  Mind you, if you’re going to get bent out of shape about plot points from forty- and almost-fifty-year-old films, I think you should probably leave via the nearest exit.

For those of you who don’t know what the Video Nasties are or what happened, I’ll give you a quick overview.  There are loads of other people out there who have gone over the whole period in greater detail, this is just to get anyone who doesn’t know caught up.

In the early eighties in the UK, with the greater affordability of video cassette players, there was a boom in video rentals.  At this time the video distribution companies didn’t need to apply to the BBFC to have the videos classified – which is something I didn’t know until looking this up to make sure I got it right.

The legislation for dealing with videos was apparently covered by the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which wasn’t really fit for this purpose.  It essentially meant an unregulated market, and as we know that never leads to trouble, because companies trying to make money know how to behave themselves.  Nah.  They flooded the place with really dodgy stuff, that parents might not have been aware wasn’t suitable for their precious poppets.  Although looking at the lurid covers to the most famous stuff, it would have taken a particularly negligent or outright stupid parent to not know what they were getting into.  And things like Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, The Driller Killer and Gestapo’s Last Orgy are not ambiguous titles.

'Oh, the kids will love this!'

Still, sniffing a moral outrage to be vocally morally outraged about, white-haired publicity troll-pensioner Mary Whitehouse was awakened like Godzilla, if Godzilla really didn’t want you to see penises and boobs.  And when Mary Whitehouse and her crazed acolytes made demands, the quivering establishment twisted themselves into knots to obey.

With only that Obscene Publications Act for the establishment to wield, the Department of Public Prosecutions got involved in the whole mess.  The police stomped into video rental shops and scooped up anything they thought might fit the ‘obscene’ criteria.  I understand this led to a few things getting grabbed that weren’t even close to being in the Video Nasties category.

In total 72 films were hauled before the DPP, 39 of which were actually prosecuted.  It’s films from this list of 72 that I’ve been interested in over the years.  There is another supplemental list, but it doesn’t really interest me quite as much.  Then there are the banned films that aren’t considered Nasties, again not of interest here.

Anyway, the upshot is that the BBFC was given the remit to look at films for both cinematic and home release.  Meaning most films get looked at twice and could be given different ratings and cuts for home and theatrical release in the UK, which is…weird.

There’s obviously more to it than that, but I’m not interested in regurgitating the whole thing here.  I’ve got other things to say and I’d rather not drive away more of the few people reading this than absolutely necessary.

So, I stumbled on the Video Nasties on Amazon Prime while flicking through the available horror films at some point in the summer of 2020.  I had watched a few Dario Argento films, including Suspiria for the first time, and caught sight of The Burning and then, rather more surprisingly, Cannibal Holocaust in the list.  I was intrigued when I dug a bit more and found a clutch of other lesser-known nasties there.

As a sidenote, I have thoughts on Dario Argento and his films.  I’m not going into them here, but I may do so in the future.  Moreso if I can find Tenebrae to watch, which is his entry in the Video Nasties list.

There will be a reckoning.

Despite the reputation, not all of the Video Nasties are horror films.  There’s a section of them that are crime films and another that are concentration camp exploitation.  From what I’ve read of the concentration camp films, I’m not surprised they got picked up, there’s going to be a ‘too soon, man’ card on those for a long time.

What did I think of the of the Video Nasties I’ve watched?  In general, they are bad films.  There are a couple of standout films, like The Evil Dead and The Last House on the Left (which I haven’t seen, annoyingly), but mostly it’s a lot of shit movies.  They struggle to get over mediocre.

Of the ones I watched last year, Cannibal Holocaust is probably the best film.  I’ll talk about that later, though.

I’ll instead start at the absolute bottom of the barrel and talk about Zombie Creeping Flesh, or Hell of the Living Dead.  Quite a few of the Video Nasties have multiple titles, I’ve noticed, I mean in the case of something like Anthropophagous: The Beast it’s because of multiple cuts of the films in question.  From what I can tell about Zombie Creeping Flesh, this is not the case, it’s just the one terrible film that’s been re-titled, like a way of fooling people into watching it over and over again.  Believe me, there has to trickery involved to watch this a second time.  Getting through once was a dubious achievement for me.

Even the cover looks low-effort.

I need to confess at this point that I don’t like zombie films as a genre to start with.  I have enjoyed zombie films, but they tend to be comedies like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland or The Return of the Living Dead.  The whole premise of serious zombie films leaves me cold.  I don’t think liking zombie films would have increased my enjoyment of Zombie Creeping Flesh.

Zombie Creeping Flesh seems to straddle the intersection between zombie films and cannibal films and benefits from neither.  It has the stupid protagonists of zombie films and the racism of cannibal films.  Lump that in with an obvious non-budget and you’re onto a complete loser.  Everything about it is bad, from the script to the acting to the awful, awful ‘action’ sequences.  The notable thing about some of the action scenes is the special forces guy who is supposed to be so agile and quick the zombies can’t get him, but the actor has all the grace and speed of a dried pile of mud, so that the zombie actors have to hold back from grabbing the idiot.

You almost have to give the makers a few points for trying to make the obvious European location (Spain, specifically) look like Papua New Guinea by splicing in stock footage of exotic animals.  It doesn’t work and looks even more ridiculous when you see that the tropical trees in the stock footage look nothing like the European trees in the footage the director shot.  There’s a lot to rag on in this film, but I’ll leave it at it’s by the far the worst quality of the Video Nasties I’ve seen.  The awful cut of Anthropophagous: The Beast might come close to the shit quality but manages to pip it by having something approaching a coherent, albeit boring, plot.

Another film that’s almost as bad as Zombie Creeping Flesh is Night of the Demon.  I’m going to add a caveat that the print Amazon streams seems to be a third-generation VHS copy, so that’s fantastic.  This one is about a horny-angry sasquatch who stomps around the woods murdering unwary travellers (including the biker who gets his dick wrenched off for the crime of needing to go for a pee, one of the oft-mentioned scenes from this turd) and having sex with a distressingly underaged girl.  This is one of those films where I probably wondered aloud if the makers actually know what a story is or are really just a lone wind-up car bumping endlessly against a typewriter.

Penis removal not shown.

The Toolbox Murders, Death Trap, The Burning and The Beyond are all of a similar terrible-but-better-than-Zombie-Creeping-Flesh quality.  The Beyond is the best of these because it goes for and hits a demented dream-like quality.  The effects are still laughably bad and it’s more confusing than scary, but it does have the distinction of having an interesting take on hell, which I’m sure inspired The Void from 2016, which is a plus.

Death Trap was Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it is nowhere near as good.  He jumps at bonkers and, to be fair to him, hits it, but then slithers down into stupid and dull.  I couldn’t get away from the weirdly stagy lighting of the whole film.  I suppose the constant red glow supplements the relentlessly sleazy atmosphere but doesn’t make it a good film.  Robert Englund’s presence doesn’t save it and neither does the original Morticia Addams, Carolyn Jones.

The Burning seems to be a bigger budget production, scurrying as it does on the heels of the extremely successful Friday the 13^th.  The producers were even able to spring for a score composed by arch-prog-rock keyboard botherer Rick Wakeman.  Not that bigger US studio productions completely dodged being hauled in, there are far fewer of them on DPP’s list.  Y’know that Friday the 13^th comparison?  It runs fucking deep, I’ll tell ya.  You’ve got your summer camp with a tragic prank-gone-wrong in its past, a bunch of randy teenagers and a disfigured killer, although this came out a week after Friday the 13^th Part 2, (in case you didn’t know, Jason Voorhees didn’t become the antagonist of the series until part two) so that last one was probably coincidence.  The teenagers getting offed plot is, however very much in the Friday the 13^th mould.

I’ve seen reviews for The Burning saying it’s a decent horror effort and I’m going to have to strongly disagree.  For one of these films there needs to be tension and that gets lost in the Meatballs-esque antics of the kids and councillors.  There are attempts at creating atmosphere at sporadic points for the first half, like the makers forgot it was a horror and they were putting together a charming summer camp comedy.  Almost like they lost faith in what they were doing, and given how slapshod it all plays out, I don’t blame them.  If you’re up for watching it, look out for Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter in very early roles.

The Toolbox Murders is another relentlessly dull effort.  Supposedly based on a true story, but not really.  This one opens with a flurry of murders, but then runs out of steam for what seems like two hours, but is only about half an hour before a mid-film plot-twist tells you that the makers should have put together a completely different and probably more interesting film.  I’ll go so far as to say that the story doesn’t actually start until halfway through the film.  As it is, it blunders along like the worst made-for-TV-movie true story you could imagine.  It blunders along as much as the completely superfluous police investigation.  I mean, seriously, the police don’t do anything to even advance the plot and aren’t even interesting characters.  Mannequins in paper hats with ‘COP’ written on them would have done as good a job.

It apparently gets a bit parky murdering a bunch of people.

An interesting thing about The Toolbox Murders, is that there was a ‘remake’ in 2005 directed by Tobe Hooper called Toolbox Murders.  This is better than both Death Trap and the original The Toolbox Murders.  Toolbox Murders bears no relation, as far as I can tell, to The Toolbox Murders other than the similar title, and benefits greatly from it.

I’ve decided to put the cannibal films in as a separate thing.  Why?  Because they share a lot of things.  They are all Italian productions of one sort or another.  Really a huge portion of the Video Nasties list groans under the weight of the excesses of Italian cinema.

They are all racist as fuck.  Even Cannibal Holocaust with its ‘white people are the real villains’ manages to do this by depicted the native people as a bunch of barely-sentient and backward idiots.  They all manage to have the white person hard-on for how amazing white people are in comparison to brown and black people.  It makes an already unpleasant watching experience even more awkward.

And speaking of unpleasant, let’s mention the fucking animal cruelty.  Animal cruelty is never acceptable as entertainment, not even close to it.  Yet the makers of these cannibal films twist it to make it even worse.  Imagine that!  Taking something that’s already abhorrent and managing to find away of making it even worse.  That takes a certain kind of talent, I suppose, but not a talent that should be practiced.  The makers of these film kill and torture animals who were otherwise getting on with their day for no plot reason.  It’s just in there for the gratuitous titillation of a bunch of trogs.  Don’t worry I’m not going to catalogue that shit, if you want to know, either watch the films or look them up.  It’s what makes the cannibal film unique amongst the Video Nasties, along with the concentration camp stuff, where you can see the censors might have had a point.

I was wavering on leaving it to the end, but I think I’ll kick off by talking about Cannibal Holocaust.  The most famous of this subsection of the Video Nasties list.

Better effects than feature in most of the film.

I do mean it when I say this is by far the best Video Nasty I watched in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good film by any means.  It has noticeable themes, even if those themes are wrapped in a crunchy coating of racism and an unfortunate helping of irony.  The whole point of this film is that the filmmakers depicted in it are horrible people who did horrible things to the locals.  This includes the heavy suggestion that they murdered a woman and staged her body in one of the most iconic images from the film.  The irony being that the director, Ruggero Deodato, was a complete prick to the actors and real-life locals he used as extras.  He filmed nude scenes of the female lead against her wishes as just one example.

There’s no need to go into all the prosecution stuff.  I’ve been repeating enough information in this as it is.  If you want to find out about the controversies around Cannibal Holocaust, there’s lots of places to find it.

It’s all very nice that Deodato admitted he regretted the animal cruelty in the film.  Which I suppose is something, but his treatment of cast and crew in light of what he was trying to say with the film weakens his thesis just a tiny bit.

This brings me on to Prisoner of the Cannibal God.  I don’t actually have a lot to say about this film in all honesty.  It’s as dumb as fuck, tries to be critical of western greed, flubs it and leaves us with a film whose biggest point of interest is a naked Ursula Andress.  Very diverting and all, but not worth nearly one-hundred minutes of humdrum pish.

Finally, we come to Man from Deep River.  This one’s a bit of a curiosity as it’s a retelling of A Man Called Horse.  I have never seen A Man Called Horse, mainly because as a genre the Western has never interested me, so I’m not in a position to compare the two films, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say the 1970 film is much better.  Just a wild guess there.  The only notable thing about this one, and it is not a good thing, is it has by far the most animal cruelty of the three cannibal films I watched.  To begin with I was congratulating it on having very little, then the filmmakers roll up their sleeves and really ram that shit in there.  Golden Turd for going that extra mile to be complete cunts, people.

Still not sure what that thing is.

What all this boils down to is how stupid and nonsensical the whole Video Nasties situation was.  Yeah, there needed to be control over the films put onto the shelves.  The solution of having ratings on the cases was fine.  The furore caused by people like Mary Whitehouse is always going to go all Streisand and a slew of terrible-to-mediocre films are going become famous even though they really don’t deserve it.  The cannibal films are the only ones that deserved that kind of scrutiny but getting rid of the animal cruelty would have cleared most of them up like lotion on haemorrhoids.  Films like The Toolbox Murders, Night of the Demon and Zombie Creeping Flesh should never have tickled the general population’s consciousness, but here they are with more power than their ineptitude and artlessness should warrant.  And the top-tier of the Video Nasties like The Evil Dead, Possession and The Last House on the Left should never have been lumped in with the rest.  You may think I’ve judged these films harshly and frankly, yes I have, because they are terrible films and must be punished.

Now I still need to watch a bunch of less-terrible and less-depressing films to flush out some of the shit left by these films.  If you’re going to watch any of these films, remember to have a happy or comforting film on standby as remedy, you’ll thank me if you do.

Late to the Party Again!

 

'Have you considered changing your energy supplier?'

I am a fan of the original 1978 Halloween.  Ever since I saw that flickering jack-o’-lantern and heard John Carpenter’s minimalist synth theme when I was way too young and was told to turn the television off, it has been part of my psyche.  I haven’t seen every entry in the franchise: I didn’t get to see the final straight-to-video one with Paul Rudd or the 2002 effort Halloween: Resurrection, and I refuse to watch the Rob Zombie ones, because frankly, while I enjoy his music, he should not be allowed in a film director’s chair.

So, with that in mind, I was very interested in the 2018 effort directed by David Gordon Green he co-wrote with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley.  Due to a few factors, mostly money, I didn’t get to see it in the cinema, so I had to wait an entire year before getting to see it.

My first viewing was an enjoyable experience.  It moved at a fair clip, once all the set-up was out of the way.  It’s not the same as the original, there is a different feeling to it, not quite as lean, but that pace kept my interest until the finale.

So, this is a good place to point out that what follows has a plethora of spoilers.  If you haven’t seen this film, want to and don’t want to have the whole thing given away, I’ll give you a chance to zip off and perhaps come back to compare notes.  That would be cool, right?  Beyond the giant ‘spoilers ahead’, there will be spoilers.  Ready?

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Everybody settled in who is ready to take this journey with me?  Good.

My first viewing of Halloween (2018) was a decent experience, with that in mind, this year, a few days after Halloween, I decided to go over it again.  I was kind of inspired by the trailer for Halloween Kills dropping.

Let’s go over the plot, shall we?  Just to get into the exercise.

This film takes place twenty years after John Carpenter’s original and tosses out everything after that film, including Halloween II (1981).  All the straight-video-sequels and H20 (which made vague allusions to all those iffy early nineties sequels) and, it goes without saying, the Rob Zombie films don’t even factor in.  The Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’s younger sister thread is thrown away as a rumour.

As such, the conceit is that after being shot six times and falling out of a first-floor window, despite the disappearing act, Michael Myers was apprehended.  We find him at the start of this film in a psychiatric hospital on the eve of being transferred to a more secure facility.  He is being visited by a couple of English true-crime podcasters who wave the Shatner mask at him that somehow upsets the other patients.  This came under criticism at the time, and while it does have a bit of hokeyness, I can forgive it for cinematic casualty.  It's atmosphere, man.

Myers’s attending doctor, Doctor Ranbir Sartain, is sympathetic towards Myers and he’s unhappy with the upcoming transfer.  This will come up later, remember it.

He can't possibly have another agenda, right?

On the same day, the podcasters go to visit Laurie Strode, who has become a paranoid, possibly alcoholic, crank.  They anger her by waffling some cod-psychiatric stuff at her about her connection to Myers and she tells them to leave.

We are introduced to Laurie’s daughter Karen Nelson, her husband Ted and her daughter Allyson.  It is established that Karen’s and Laurie’s relationship is almost non-existent because of Laurie’s all-consuming obsession with Myers.  An obsession that ruined Karen’s childhood, so she tries to protect Allyson from Laurie.  There is a lot of stuff about Allyson inviting Laurie to her graduation, Karen lying about inviting Laurie and Ted being a bit of mild comic relief.  Laurie is triggered after watching the bus take Myers to the new facility and she goes to Allyson’s graduation meal where there is a confrontation.

As is to be expected Myers escapes.  The bus turns over in mysterious circumstances.  Dr. Sartain is injured, but survives.  Myers murders a man and his son to steal their truck.

It’s at this point we are introduced to Deputy Frank Hawkins who helped apprehend Myers before.

Myers racks up more kills as he goes through the employees of a garage, in broad daylight and catches up with the podcasters.  It’s here that he acquires the boiler suit and gets his mask back.  The pace picks up too.

Allyson has a fight with her boyfriend at a Halloween party and leaves.  There’s no point in mentioning him, as his entire purpose is to force Allyson to leave the party.  He doesn't factor again and doesn't even warrant a killing.

Myers murders a couple of randos, getting himself a carving knife, and also kills two of Allyson’s friends who were babysitting.  This is when Laurie has her first confrontation with Myers in twenty years, but he escapes under her and Hawkins’s noses.

You've got this, Laurie...or maybe not.

Laurie persuades Karen and Ted to go to with her to her isolated house in the woods, while the police look for Myers and Allyson.  Allyson can’t be contacted because her boyfriend threw away her phone.

Sartain joins Hawkins in the search for Allyson, which happens pretty quickly after Myers kills another one of Allyson’s friends after they have an argument.

Now we get the payoff to Sartain’s sympathies as Myers is spotted by Allyson, and Hawkins runs him over.  Before Hawkins can finish Myers off, Sartain reveals he has either a bespoke murder pen or a tactical pen.  Whatever, he stabs Hawkins to death and shoves Myers in the back of the cruiser with Allyson.  The ‘mysterious circumstances’ from earlier were Dr. MadBastard stabbing enough people to allow Myers to escape and he would have got away with it if it weren’t for a literal pesky kid.  He wants to ally himself with Myers, but Myers being a consummate lone wolf murders all of the shit out of him, while incidentally allowing Allyson to escape.

Two more police are killed, along with Ted.  Ted, of course, having about as much impact on the whole thing as the two anonymous police officers.

This is where my problems started with the film.  Going through the plot again, there are some curious things, but again, there’s leeway for the medium, you know?

Before I get to the main reason for me writing this, I’ll go over some of the ways in which the film does good work, but most of these points have caveats.  I was amused by Allyson’s and her boyfriend’s gender-swapped Bonnie and Clyde costumes.  It does feel a bit like a novelty inclusion, though.

There are two characters here, I promise.

Sartain could be seen as a representation of the dangers of centrism.  His ‘both the victim and victimiser are damaged by the acts’ is as bonkers as the current political media thoughts on both sides having a right to airing their views, no matter how abhorrent.  Just like in real life, this kind of extreme fence-sitting only helps the party causing the damage.  Is that me reading too much into it?  Dunno, could be.

The feminist thread is a lot more obvious.  Most of the male characters are ineffectual or outright harmful and it’s left to the Strode women to take care of things.  There is a serious caveat here that I’ll get to later.

Those nice shots that recreate the 1978 version are nice though.  Like Allyson sitting in the same classroom, even the same position Laurie did, looking out the window to see, not Myers, but Laurie.

Here we come to the inspiration for this post.  I’ll throw in a spoiler of my own here, the end severely ruined my re-watch of this film.  There was a hint or two earlier that it was going to drop into a mire of stupidity, but I didn’t expect it to drop so far, even after my first watch.

Perhaps my expectations were raised after watching Crawl (2019) a few days before.  This is another lean film with a couple of capable characters in a fucking awful situation and being thwarted by circumstance.

Myers is now at Laurie’s house which we would expect to be a damned fortress.  We’ve seen that she has a hidden cellar full of weapons.  You would imagine that the front door with the heavy metal bar would also be reinforced.  Especially those glass panels.  Nope.  Laurie looks out at Myers after he’s just broken poor old ‘I know Brazilian jiu-jitsu’ Ted’s neck and hides behind the door.  Only to be almost throttled when Myers easily punches through those not-at-all-reinforced glass panels.

We’ve already established Laurie is an obsessed crank.  She ruined Karen’s childhood in a wrong-headed effort to protect her from this trauma that almost claimed her life (oh, look a theme that I missed, the cycle of trauma), going to such lengths as creating a hidden bunker brimming over with weapons under her kitchen.  She knows that Myers is an implacable murder-force, who is improbably strong and has a minor waving acquaintance with the idea of dying, but decided she just had to have those decorative panels instead of toughened glass, or even a sliding panel she could safely poke a gun out of.  It seems like a bit of an oversight for someone who we’ve been told has been preparing for this confrontation FOR FORTY YEARS!

'I stand by my choice in door aesthetics!'

As you all know, she escapes by blasting off a couple of Myers’s digits with her shotgun.  Okay, okay.  Then she just runs away.  She’s fired a single shot.  Remember, lumbering kill-golem, Laurie?  The dude you’ve been having nightmares about for five decades?  Why you not empty the shotgun into that Shatner mask?  Why you run away?  Even if not blasting face, pulping his knees with the shotgun would do.  He obviously can’t magically regenerate, as we see from the glimpse of his damaged eye where she stabbed him with a coat hanger.

I get it, there had to be tension.  There had to be the possibility that Laurie might die but getting a dose of The Stupids should never be it.  Stupidity is one of the biggest reasons horror films stand or fall.  A few dumb character actions can be forgiven and even move things along, when it’s the only driver of the plot, the driver at a critical moment or the actions of a character we've been shown should be more than capable, we have problems.

The stupidity continues when Myers disappears somewhere in the house.  Laurie has set up shutters at the door to each of the rooms, clever, in case she missed a corner, or he slinks in through a window, he can’t sneak up on her.  However, she has one room, a single room, she’s decided to designate her target practice mannequin room, which is also The Balcony Room.  Instead of saying, ‘fuck it, I’ll just roll down the shutter’ she goes in with a rifle and searches.  Weirdly this does not go well, and we get a flipped situation from the 1978 film where Myers looks out to see Laurie lying on the ground, but when he looks again, she’s gone(!).

It’s almost the end game.  Myers discovers the bunker where Karen and Allyson have been hiding.  Karen lures him out to shoot him.  When he falls into the bunker she and Allyson run out and we discover it’s been a trap all along!  The whole house is set up to burn, with Myers stuck in the inferno.  Except, not really.  Cue, the bizarre trilogy idea.

'Fire?  More like splire, amirite?'

This whole sorry mess undermines the women-getting-it-done narrative.  There are so many questions and idiotic decisions that lead to the confrontation and it’s by sheer luck it doesn’t just end up with three generations of women strewn all over the house and Myers tottering off for his next scheduled massacre.  I mean I’m not sure the entire house needed to be burned down – have a heavy door that seals the basement, the superheated air would burn out his lungs, Myers needs those lungs for his heavy breathing antics.

As far as I can see the whole narrative turns into a fucking stew of dumb about the time Sartain kills Hawkins.  I feel like once he’d done that, he could have taken Myers and Allyson somewhere to lure Laurie into the confrontation he thought should happen.  It would also have set up her house as the final-final confrontation in the upcoming Halloween Ends.  The set up for Halloween Kills is improbable even by Halloween standards.

I’ve seen the Halloween films as a whole be described as lazy, but I’m not entirely on board with that.  The original still stands up, because it’s not trying to do anything fancy.  The 2018 iteration was doing well until the climax, the set up for the two follow-ups is just a lethargic cherry on top of an already sloppily finished desert.

I’m sad that the re-watch only served to show up the horrible weaknesses in this film.  It won’t be a film I’ll watch again, at least not by design.  However, I will watch the rest of this trilogy to see how many tedious knots the writers tie themselves in to stretch it out.  I know, I’m being part of the problem, pity me.

Okay, I might give this another whirl after thirty-some years.

Where to find my books.

Some time ago I published a bunch of books on Amazon Kindle.  Mostly they are ebooks, but there is a print version of DARK EVE, for those interested in physical copies.  It's all horror.  Lots of it.

If you are interested in buying these titles you can find them on Amazon UK here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/William-Couper/e/B00CXQ8BA0

And for the US, you can find them here:

https://www.amazon.com/William-Couper/e/B00CXQ8BA0

Buy!  Read!  Enjoy!


Will

On The Road to Worldcon 75 with Janos Honkonen, Kaaron Warren and William Couper

On The Road to Worldcon 75 with Janos Honkonen, Kaaron Warren and William Couper

The Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland is drawing near! To get into the mood the independent publishing house Osuuskumma has launched a series of blog posts, where writers around the world talk about their work, the fandom, cons and everything spec-fi. Let’s see what’s happening in Finland, Australia and Scotland!

Who are you people and what’s your background as an author?

Janos: I’m Janos Honkonen, a spec-fi writer in my early 40’s, and I currently live in Turku, Finland. I have so far published one novel (Kaiken yllä etana, 2013), a bunch of short stories mostly in Finnish but some in English, and some comics. I’ve released one work of interactive fiction (read: a text adventure game) that won the 2012 Spring Thing competition, and I’m incredibly lucky to have landed a full time day job writing for video games.

Kaaron: I’m Kaaron Warren, a writer living in Canberra, Australia. I have four novels and six short story collections, horror and science-fiction mostly. I’ve been writing since I was a kid and published my first short story in 1993.

Will: This person is William Couper. I’m a writer from Scotland, living in Kirkintilloch. I’ve had a few short stories published in the last few years, mostly it’s been horror, but I do meander into sci-fi and fantasy when the fancy takes me. More recently I’ve waded into the murky waters of self-publishing.

Why do you write speculative fiction?

Will: It’s fairly simple: escapism.

As a kid in Scotland if you were a boy you were expected to join the other boys playing football (or soccer, depending on your bent), but I was never that interested in the game. But, no matter where it was, at home or on the playground, the boys were expected to congregate and kick around a ball. A lot of the time I didn’t, I would go off and do my own thing, which was exercising my imagination. A lot of it based on television and films.

Horror films hooked me early, too, so when I picked up my first novel, it was a horror novel. A lot of my teenage years were spent cooped up in my room and that’s when I started writing short stories and eventually books. Writing stories I wanted to read, and still want to read.

Long story short, I write because it’s an extension of the habit of living in my own head.

Janos: I pretty much grew on old school sci-fi, such as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and my favourite, Stanislaw Lem. It was discovery and escapism, but the kind of escapism where you accidentally learned new stuff and got new perspectives to the world. (Although, oh boy - does Heinlein read differently at 15 and at 35.) From sci-fi I went to horror, and cheap thrills aside, for me it kind of did to human condition what sci-fi did to the universe. Horror switched the telescope to a microscope and gave new, terrifying ideas of what humans can be.

William Couper

I’ve written stories ever since I was a kid, and sci-fi, horror and later magical realism just were a perfect fit. What I want to do is to offer the same kind of thing to the readers which I got as a young reader: being entertained and a little bit educated at the same time.

Will: I’ve never read Heinlein, but I’ve heard people say there’s a difference in reading experience depending on age. What is that difference?

Janos: FASCISM. Heh, okay, not quite the goose-stepping kind, but the ideological layer kiiinda shines through. Even in his YA-book Have Space Suit--Will Travel the protagonist (SPOILER ALERT) pretty much shrugs away the bad guys being eaten alive and the evil race being wiped off in a genocide, because “there’s a limit how much you need to understand criminals”.

Will: Ah, yes, that whole business. Ol’ Bobby Heinlein’s, um, enthusiastic politics. Stuff you don’t quite notice as a kid, but it’s like a siren once you’re older.

Janos: Like the novel Starship Troopers. Not really the sarcastic look at glorifying the military like the film is.

Kaaron: I’m probably a combination of both of you. I grew up in a household full of books, my dad being an avid reader. He loved SF and still does, so I read Heinlein, Asimov and the Nebula Winners, over and over. Once I discovered horror, through those terrifying old comics such as Weird Tales of the Macabre, I was hooked, just like Will. I discovered Stephen King via the movie version of The Shining, believe it or not. I can still remember standing in Woodwork class, hearing the radio commercial for the movie and thinking, “I’m seeing that, no matter what.”

What’s your latest publication?

Janos: When this comes out, it might be a short story called Eläimet huutaa, ihmiset ei huuda, in English “Animals scream, people don’t scream”. It was published in an anthology of body horror stories, and it’s an amalgamation of all the worst real world dentist stories I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances. The name of the story is a quote from a dentist with a real old school bedside manner.

Will: That guy sounds utterly charming.

Admittedly, It’s been a while, but the last thing published by someone else was last year with Mykes Reach in the Lovecraft anthology, Cthulhu Lies Dreaming, by Ghostwoods Books.

Kaaron: Oh, gosh, dentist stories….love that title, Janos! I wrote about a dentist in Dead Sea Fruit. She knew what sort of person her patients were by the smell of their breath. Creepy. I actually do have a collection of baby teeth that don’t belong to me or my children.

My latest story in print is Furtherest, in Cemetery Dance’s Dark Screams. Inspired by the true story of some missing children, and the dummies police made in an attempt to figure out who took them. It’s an Aussie Beach horror story.

What are you working on now?

Janos: Day in, day out, I’m of course hammering together the game in the day job. It’s a very much narrative game based on a comic, so it’s not just writing barks for enemy soldiers. I’m also trying to put together a treatment for an Augmented Reality game for another outfit, but I might have to drop that.

On the literature side of things I’m trying to get the second novel off the ground. I have one concept that got slightly overrun by a very similar award winning novel right when I was starting to write it, another good beginning where I ran into an impasse with background research, and a third one that’s too straightforward to keep my interest. So, heh - good at starting novels, but currently lacking the follow through. I’m working on a bunch of short stories, though, and I’m translating a long ass story of 18th century pirates of the Baltic Sea and modern wreck robbery in English. There’s also an English language film script on the back burner, waiting for another production to finish.

Will: I’m challenging myself at the moment. I’ve decided to do something non-fiction, but it’s still spec-fic adjacent which is...cool, right? I am putting together a book about my experiences and thoughts on Magic: The Gathering. I’ve never written non-fiction to the length I’m aiming at for this book, so we’ll see how that shakes out. It’s a totally different process of collecting your thoughts and codifying impressions. Remembering incidents from twenty years ago and trying to present them in an interesting way has been a big challenge.

Kaaron: What made you decide to focus on that part of your life, Will? Sounds like a really interesting concept! All those characters, in real life as well as in the game!

I’m working on a couple of things. Finishing a robot story for Twelfth Planet Press but being distracted by the research, as can happen so easily! I’m also working on a novel inspired in part by a jail break that almost occurred from Goulburn jail. My novel imagines what happens if they got out.

Then there’s the giant monster who lives under Old Parliament House here in Canberra, and the eternity cult story, and the one the car left abandoned by a cemetery, and...

Will: Funnily, it’s something I cover in the book itself, but to cut it down, in part it was getting back into the game last year and realising it’s been hovering around in the background of my life in the years since I was first introduced to it. Another part was because I did a short-lived column on a website about my thoughts on and experiences of the game. When the people running the site had to shutter it, I didn’t want all this work go with it.

Kaaron: I look forward to reading it. Nice that some of the work is done already!

What’s your process?

Janos: With short stories I’ve been lucky to have had a lot of those “the idea just came to me” moments. A great example is the story that I’m just about to publish in English as well, The Air Itself Caught Fire. I was taking part in an anthology, but my original idea was too derivative of an older Finnish sci-fi story, and frankly rubbish. As the deadline crept near, I decided to drop the anthology. When I was leaving for lunch from my then day job, suddenly the non-fiction book I was reading and a random thought collided, I walked to the lunch in fugue, and when I got back to the office the story was there. It took two sessions to write quite a complete first draft. Some others I’ve managed to kickstart with the “a wall of crazy composed of post-it notes” method.

With longer texts, like novels, this doesn’t really work too well. I tend to start writing with very vague ideas, and to see where the story is going. I suck at planning ahead, which is what I am learning how to do.

Will: Sitting at the keyboard.

Maybe some crying. Certainly frustration. A smattering of other vaguely clichéd writing process things.

I don’t have a fixed process. Ideas come to me from all over. I’ve had the moments of inspiration, an idea sparking or a whole story winding through my brain fully formed. The moments before I fall asleep have been good for giving birth to concepts. I’ve also simply brute forced a story or used free-writing and mind-maps.

Once I have an idea, I’ll scribble it down in a notebook. It might sit there for a while, or I’ll expand it into a plot and character sketches. From there the story will be created.

Or I’ll get an idea and white-knuckle it to the end.

My process is chaos, uncertainty and the terrible, terrible fear it won’t work this time.

Kaaron: Will, I’m with you on that terrible, terrible fear it won’t work this time! I’m never really sure, even when I sell the story. I’m always wondering what I missed, how I could have worded things better.

Like both of you, I tend to start with the idea, the moment of inspiration. In my research for the robot story, I came across a description of a ‘very slow robot’, and had this image of a robot digging for a thousand years to rescue someone. I really like it but can’t use it at the moment!

Then I’ll try to figure out what the story is about. Often this is scribbling notes and just letting my imagination wander around. It’s also researching, reading, talking to people. For the monster under Old Parliament House story, a friend mentioned the urban myth that there are great pools of diesel in the basement there, and that was the final clue I needed to finish the story.

I work out whose voice I’ll tell the story in, because that really decides where the story will go. Sometimes it takes writing a few pages of description of the place, or a nutting out of the original idea, but I usually get there in the end. Once I have the voice, I can bash out a first draft.

I usually do at least five drafts, I reckon.

Where does the magic happen? Where do you write and work?

Janos: When I was an overachieving freelance journalist, I spent over seven years writing at home, so currently whatever apartment I live in live in isn’t a place where creativity dwells in. I used to write mostly on the move, in bars and cafes and such. Unfortunately I got my neck broken for me and caught a slight case of paralysis, so I can’t be that mobile anymore. I had the huge luck of getting an awesome work room in a local game incubator, though, where I do most of my writing and game prototyping.

Will: Nothing spectacular. Due to space, I write in my living room, at a desk.

Kaaron: Gosh, Janos! A broken neck...one day you can tell us the story of how that happened. I most write at home, moving around the house, following the sun. I like to write in our National Library, which is quiet and smells of old books, and has the most amazing paper archives. I’ve found letters from artists I admire, talking about the settings that have inspired them, and much much more.

What is the zeitgeist with speculative fiction where you live ?

Janos: Right now the Finnish speculative fiction field is enjoying a golden era. The large publishers are struggling a bit, and they don’t necessarily publish a lot of “marginal” literature such as domestic sci-fi. The thing is, smaller independent publishers are popping up to pick up the slack, and there’s almost a glut of anthologies coming out every year. It’s amusing to see the non-genre critics and reporters lament “the death of short stories”, when on this side of the fence the yearly amount of published stories is around 200-300.

One noteworthy thing is that in the year 2000 a spe-fi novel won the most prestigious literature award up here, Finlandia. The novel was Not Before Sundown (Troll - a love story in U.S.) by Johanna Sinisalo.

Will: The wrongest question to ask me. I’m not one of the spec-fic cognoscenti. Anything I try to add to this will be open to accusations of almost stone age ignorance. So I won’t be foolish enough to try.

Kaaron: I’ll have to see if that novel is available in Australia! I’d love to read it. Genre is doing okay here. We still struggle to be seen at the literary festivals, though that is changing a lot with writers like Garth Nix and Kate Forsyth finding great success. We have a number of excellent small press publishers who focus solely on Spec-fic.

What is the spe-fi community like where you live?

Kaaron: There’s a goodly bunch of us here. You’ll meet a lot of them at Worldcon! I’m not sure how many are coming over, but a lot! We don’t have a lot of conventions each year (annually one in Melbourne, Perth and Canberra, with the National Convention usually held in one of those cities) and so we tend to attend them well. I’ve always found it to be a very supportive community, and I try to welcome new writers in just as I was welcomed.

Will: Again, since I’m not completely, plugged into the community, I’m not too sure. From my limited perspective, the UK as a whole has a solid bunch of people, especially on the sci-fi/fantasy side, guys like Charles Stross and China Miéville standing as giants. You’ve also got Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis and Alan Moore.

Closer to home, there’s Hal Duncan and Neil Williamson doing interesting stuff. There’s no doubt more and I apologise for my ignorance.

I’m not terribly sure what’s going in the horror-side of things. Which is probably terrible, given I profess to write mostly in that genre. Am I the worst? I think I might be the worst.

Janos: The sci-fi, fantasy etc. community in Finland has been very thriving and active for such a small country. We have a tradition of zines which have offered a great way to get published, Finncon has brought in guests of honour and offered the usual non-commercial con fare since the 80’s, etc. Traditionally Finncon has been quite literature oriented, but it has evolved with the times.

A thing to note is that the Finnish fandom is and has been quite egalitarian from the beginning. By this I mean it hasn’t been strictly a boys’ club where the women are seen as groupies or just girlfriends, and they don’t generally have to prove they are “real” fans. Oh, and I was told the representation of women publishing short stories in professional and semi-professional levels has been so strong, that in 2000’s it may be that more short form spe-fi is published by women than men.

Will: That’s a very interesting observation about the Finnish spec-fic scene. What do you think accounts for the higher numbers of women being published in Finland? What do you think the rest of the world could learn from it?

Janos: Someone who was in the trenches back then told me that there was a contingent of female fans right from the beginning, and female editors working in semipro zines. No doubt this paved the way to a fandom that’s more equal, and helped establish women as writers. Apparently there were some boys’ clubs, who - and I quote - “tried to reconquer their manly field, drunk and in jest”, but apparently nothing very serious. Seems like we dodged some bullets which are still drawing blood here and there, especially in video game and comic circles.

What’s your relationship with and thoughts about WorldCon?

Janos: I’m interested to see what’s it about, and perhaps to see some friends and contacts from abroad. I’m not much of a con person, frankly. I went to RopeCon a few times in the late 90’s and the turn of the millennium. No, despite the name it’s not a bondage thing, but the biggest non-commercial role-playing con in Europe. I and I’ve visited Finncon only once, which was last year when my short story was nominated for the yearly Atorox prize. I don’t have anything against cons as such, they’re just not generally my thing, especially the bigger commercial ones. I’ve been to Supanova for work, and although it was nice, it was a bit… clinical compared to the craziness of the local non-commercial cons I’ve gotten used to. I’ve also been to SDCC for work once, and man, I’d rather chew my leg off than do that again. Nevertheless, skipping Worldcon would be just stupid for both personal and professional reasons, and I’m pretty confident it will be a nice experience!

Will: I’ve heard of WorldCon, but I’ve never been. I’ve been to a few conventions before, with the idea of making contacts. The experiences have been good on a purely fun level, but an absolute failure in a business sense.

Well-run conventions are essential for the life of the communities they represent. They get people together, they build relationships. Fans getting to meet their favourite creators and like-minded folk keeps things vibrant. Creators get to talk together, compare notes or simply unwind. Conventions are a net positive for everyone.

Kaaron: Janos, there’s no way you could miss this one! I wish I was coming over for it. I went to Worldcon in Montreal, which I loved, and in Melbourne, which was fantastic because it was in my own country so nowhere near as expensive! I found both of them huge but small at the same time. There are thousands of people there, but you find your own small group, or various small groups, and hang out with them. I met a lot of people I’m still friends with in Montreal and the same in Melbourne. I’m always inspired at conventions, both with ideas for stories and motivation for keeping at it.

What is the greatest challenge for you as an author?

Will: It’s a terrible admission, but concentration is the biggest dragon I need to slay when I’m writing. When I’m fully committed, everything’s great, it’s like my mind is on rails and stuff just flows. Other times, I tap out a sentence or a paragraph and then something catches my attention and I go, ‘ooo, a shiny’ and half an hour later I haven’t written any more. It’s a constant struggle.

Janos: I’ve lately had to admit to myself that I’m not a very prolific writer when it comes to novels. With short stories I’m doing okay, I have 5-6 of them coming out in different local anthologies this year, including one translation, plus one comic. The thing is, if you want to make a career as an author, you should be able to crank out novels in some predictable fashion. Maybe things change, maybe not, but that’s what’s currently bugging me.

Also, as I mentioned, I’m not as mobile as I used to be, which makes it hard to do the kinds of outdoorsy spontaneous things I used as palate cleansers for my brain. It makes it a bit harder to concentrate on being creative. The words hide in places where I don’t have an access to anymore.

Will: Aye, the challenge of having the constant flow of work is another major thing. Because my workstyle is so, not quite random, but less than consistent, predictability is a severely limited commodity.

I also agree that having things outside of writing, no matter how small, can keep the engine turning over.

Kaaron: Definitely good to have something else going on outside of writing. I’ve heard it called ‘refreshing the wells’ and that works for me. One of my greatest challenges is finding clear amounts of time. With a family it can be tricky. Even though my kids are teenagers now, they’re all very present in the house. I decided some time ago that this can’t stop me, though. If you wait for the perfect moment and the perfect place you’ll never get anything done. So I try to get over that! I work two days a week in a second-hand shop, and that provides me with a lot of inspiration!

Janos: Oh, a store with creepy dolls. Tell me, is it one of those Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppes that you can find only when it wants to be found?

Writing with children in the house, phew - it’s sometimes hard for me to concentrate when there’s just one adult around. I guess it might build a certain kind of work ethic, though. Like you said, not waiting for the perfect moment, but barreling through.

Kaaron: Funny you should say that, Janos, because that’s how I describe it sometimes! It really does seem that way. We have the most remarkable finds there. I found the school geography book belonging to my best friend’s brother, who lives two states away and hadn’t seen the book in about 45 years! It just came into the shop!

You really do need to re-think writing time with children around. I wrote one story while making a pot of bolognese! Inspiration hit and I knew I had to get it onto paper. So I scribbled pages in between chopping the carrot and the celery, stirring in the tomatoes, all that!

What is the latest work of fiction that made a big impression on you, or your biggest influences overall?

Will: I don’t think I’ve got one, single major influence. Like my working method, it’s all chaotic. There’s not one work and there are numerous authors and I find it impossible to whittle anything down to a singular.

The first novel I read was a big guiding factor, even though it was schlocky as all hell. It inspired my love of writing and of the horror genre. Reading a lot of Shaun Hutson drew me in further, grisly and over-sexed as a lot his books are. Dean Koontz was one of my favourite authors for a long while, but, like Janos’s attitude to Heinlein, reading Koontz’s work with a more mature eye does it no favours.

I suppose an obvious influence is Lovecraft. You know, without the hideous racism. The idea of strange things inhabiting the universe that can destroy us without knowing appeals to me. And weird monsters. I like weird monsters.

Terry Pratchett is another big influence, mainly for his storytelling ability and style. I’ve read most of the Discworld books and, more recently, the Long Earth books he did with Stephen Baxter.

It’s all a bit of a mish-mash of different sources, adding lots of different flavours to what might be called ‘my work’.

Kaaron: Stephen King and Daphne du Maurier, definitely. Early influencers and I still re-read both at times. I love reading short stories, and those are what I often read. Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best anthologies are a must, as are Paula Guran’s and our Australian ones too.

Janos: Oh, I remember only one story from Daphne du Maurier, Blue Lenses. I read it as a kid, I may have been around 10 or 11, and it has haunted me to this day. I just may have a story coming out next year that just may play with a similar idea.

What has made the biggest impression on me in the last few years is Matthew De Abaitua’s The Red Men. It’s kind of corporate occult sci-fi, and the style is quite literary and refined. It’s a book that’s hard to pin down, but I was totally blown away. And I’ve got to say Kaaron that your novel Slights is something I’ve recommended to people maybe twice this year alone. It got under my skin in a good way.

As for the influences, I’m a big Philip K. Dick fan, and I enjoy both reading and writing stuff where the reality is somehow malleable. I guess that shows in my first novel, and the second one I’m trying to hammer together. I also want to do something like what Neal Stephenson does in his novels, which is to educate while entertaining. Almost all of his books have taught me something and made me dig up more information about the subject. I guess that’s what I aim to do with many of my short stories: to sneakily impart information about for example marine archaeology, the pirates of the 18th century Baltic Sea, the history of the atom bomb, and so forth. I guess a big part of this is also the fact that the old school hard sci-fi taught me so much about science that I want to do something similar.

Kaaron: The recently released movie My Cousin Rachel is another of hers. It opens in the book describing a gibbet. That setting inspired one of my own stories!

Shillin’ like a villain: what works of yours would you like to promote to people?

Kaaron: I have a novel out from IFWG Publishing which is the first book to win all three Australian genre awards. It also won a Canberra Critics Circle Award, which is cool! That’s called The Grief Hole. It’s the Book of the Month at the Big Book Club on ABC Canberra. You can listen to an interview about it here. There’s an illustrated version of it, by the amazing artist Keely van Order. A stunningly beautiful book.

Janos: In Worldcon, our publishing outfit Osuuskumma International will release an anthology of spe-fi stories from new and established Finnish writers, including me. The anthology is called Never Stop – Finnish Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, and you can find more information here. You can buy it on paper here, and as an ebook for example in Amazon. My contribution is the story I mentioned earlier, The Air Itself Caught Fire. There’s also a collection of 100 word drabbles called The Self-Inflicted Relative out for Worldcon, and you can get it here.

The third and last volume of the comic anthologies I’ve been writing for, Torsobear, is out this summer. The genre of the anthologies is fluffy-noir, which means something like “Sin City meets Toy Story”. Great fun to write, and I got absolutely splendid illustrators for my scripts.

Will: Cthulhu Lies Dreaming is still available from Amazon and other outlets, you can find out about that here.

Speaking of Amazon, I’ve published a bunch of Kindle books and they’re here.

Recently I made my novel Dark Eve available as a print edition and that is here.