Fangs for Nothing, Folks!

[NOTE: OUTDOOR SCREENING: Please check out Cinescare's outdoor screening of Werner Herzog's 1979 masterpiece, "Nosferatu," tonight at The Video Underground in Jamaica Plain. The screening starts at 7.30pm with Attila Szasz's expertly photographed short, "Now You See Me, Now You Don't." And then it's a mini-lecture on German nationalist cinema and Herzog's vampire, followed by the feature. The event is sponsored by UFO beer. See you tonight!]

Okay, on to our look at recent horror media. 

Plenty of room for interpretation when it comes to just what HBO's renewal of True Blood for a second season — two episodes into season one — means. 

But first, all the usual suspects are frothing over Hollywood Reporter's news that Carrie Fisher is negotiating with Summit Entertainment for a role in the company's remake of "The House on Sorority Row," a 1983 slasher about the titular sisters succumbing to a serial killer after they accidentally off one of their own during a prank. 

Perhaps the sheer proximity of the Star Wars star to a genre project simply proved too much for ShockTillYouDrop and Mania, as they both run accurate stories but completely false headlines. 

The former tells us: "Carrie Fisher is the House Mother on Sorority Row," while its lead is "Carrie Fisher is in negotiations ..." Mania gets in the mix with its equally exuberant inaccuracy: "Carrie Fisher Joining Modern Sorority Row" (the distinction in time, presumably in case readers imagined Fisher might be stepping into the cast of the 1983 film). As The House of the Devil has asked before, so it asks again: Does anyone edit these things?

And now, the dirty business. True Blood's second season means somebody at HBO is taking the vampires-meets-Alien-Nation storyline seriously, but THOD has to question the voraciousness with which your favorite online horror sources slurped up channel programming president Micahel Lombardo's press release gushings. 

Here are the facts, fanged as they are: The top 10 cable programs from the week of Sept. 8, according to Nielsen, ranged from 12.5 million viewers at the top (Vikings vs. Packers game) to 5.02 million viewers in the 10th place spot (Monk). With that kind of data, let's look at the vampire show. 

Bloody-Digusting had the sense to include actual True Blood viewer numbers from Sept. 7 and Sept. 14 (1.4 million and 1.8 million). Compared to 10th-place Monk, True Blood is still in its coffin ... barely out of the ground. 

But Lombardo's release is all about the positive. As well it should be, HBO supports the program. By his measure, the show saw a 24 percent jump from 1.4 million to 1.8 million. Even that math is weird. Isn't the difference between 1.4 and 1.8 actually 28 percent? (Nobody has accused THOD of being a math wizard, however. Ever.)

No matter, the long and short of it is that the percent change has to be presented within the context of the actual numbers. For example, a 24 percent increase in Monk's viewership in one week would mean more than 1.2 million new viewers jumped on board. But in True Blood's corner, 24 percent more equals 400,000 new viewers. 

That's quite a difference of proportion. 

No one tells you this, however, out there in horror-media land. And then there's the way the percent change is characterized, or not characterized. 

Bloody-Disgusting is the most mild-tempered: "The show's aud grew significantly." Fangoria doesn't try to characterize the increase (good for them, actually) but completely fails to tell readers what size audience to which the 24 percent rise applies. Could be anything, really. ShockTillYouDrop pulls the same punch: here's the percent change, but no viewership numbers. 

And then there's Mania. Oh, Mania. 

Jarrod Sarafin apparently drank the Kool-Aid with a little too much gusto. He provides Lombardo's percent data in a rush of celebration, and conflates viewership over time with viewership at air time. 

Sarafin writes: "The Sept. 7 debut episode is proving to be a hit with HBO audiences, attracting more than four million viewers to date, while the debut of the second episode on Sept. 14 posted an unprecedented 24% gain in viewers over the first week's debut."

With that kind of smooshing together of the facts, one could draw the false conclusion that 960,000 new people started watching True Blood (that is, that the 24 percent increase is what got the viewership to 4 million, not to 1.8 million). 

And how Sarafin concocts that a 24 percent increase is "unprecedented" is a mystery. Television programs over the past several months logged increases such as 76 percent (Mad Men's season two premiere), 22 percent (2008 DNC coverage, opening night to night two), even the magical 24 percent (2008 RNC coverage debut). 

All this boils down to some basic reporting skills. When grappling with numbers and percent change, one can't just trust the press release and fork the numbers onto the reader without some kind of context. I don't suppose that genre reporting is coming from J-school grads, mind you, but does it ever seem like maybe our genre news sources tend to play four-square on the basketball court?

We'll let Lombardo have the last word, quoted from the same press release in the Hollywood Reporter (via Reuters, here): "The show deserves a second year whatever the ratings." 

Exactly. Thanks, Michael. That puts it in perspective. 

Where, Out There, the Truth is Not

Mania uncorks a bottle of "do-you-like-it?" on Fox's Fringe. They'd have you believe Fox execs are jumping for joy over the series debut.

JJ Abrams' The X-Files redux featured a pilot with actual pilots — a passenger jet full of skeletons and a familiar FBI-partners-chase-the-supernatural structure. 

What's confounding about writer Stephen Lackey's article on the show is that it is (a) headlined "Everybody's on the FRINGE," with a sub-headline maintaining "All Eyes Were on Fox for the FRINGE Premiere," and (b) his lead reads "Did you watch the series premiere of Fringe? Apparently everyone else did according to Nielsen. Preliminary numbers for the 90 minute premiere averaged 9 million viewers and a 3.2 rating/share in the adults 18 to 49 demographic."

Well, Stephen, nice try. Here's what the numbers really mean: Fringe had a modest opening, leaving Fox in fourth place overall behind NBC, CBS, and ABC, according to tvbythenumbers.com

The TV Decoder blog at the The New York Times tells us Fringe did indeed lead 18-49 year-old viewers for the the night, but that its 9 million watchers put it just in front of ABC reality competition Wipeout. 

For a $10 million episode, that's not going to win Abrams a seat of honor at the next Fox board meeting. And while Lackey notes that Fringe is the biggest premiere on Fox "in a couple of years," (he presumably means Standoff in 2006) he fails to not that Standoff — at 13.7 million viewers on its opening night — was subsequently canceled for low numbers. 

So what's going on here? Sloppily constructed opinion? A little booster action from Mania for advertising favor? 

Hard to say. But what's not hard is to predict that Fringe has a tough haul ahead of it, and all eyes were certainly not there, last Tuesday. 

Who Speaks for Chucky?

In a quiet news week, what are horror entertainment journalists to do? 

Dig something up, of course, and they've done that since Sunday, with varying results. 

ShockTillYouDrop published a smart and exclusive interview with "Child's Play" producer David Kirschner and writer Don Mancini. 

The two are at work on a remake of the 1988 original. As with most reboots, in the 2000s, this take will be darker and more realistic than its initial camp/consumer-culture infused iteration. 

Mania's Jarrod Sarafin thought well of Ryan Rotten's interview. He repackaged STYD's coup with a consumer-note lead that the original "Child's Play" is available in its 20th-anniversary edition this week. Sarafin apparently assumes buyers know new DVDs tend to drop on Tuesdays, so he doesn't include the date of the release. It's today, Sept. 9. 

And that's not all he leaves out. Sarafin moseys through the rest of this unfortunately typical Mania half-assery by dropping a quote from the STYD interview into his news item, but he forgoes any kind of attribution. We don't know who is talking, or how they might be related to "Child's Play." It's writer Mancini in Sarafin's piece, talking about the movie.

Bloody-Disgusting.com skips the "Child's Play" item entirely, but rounds up some minor casting news from in-production projects ("Killing Jar," an untitled Twisted Pictures project, and "Butterfly Effect: Revelation" [although what that film is doing on a horror cinema Web site is an open question]). 

Mr. Digusting could have skipped the clunker from 2007, however. Shoreline Entertainment (producers of "The Signal") has listed on its Web site for some time that something called "From Beyond," a reworking of H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name, is in preproduction. But it's certainly not news. No cast. No director. The company has not listed "From Beyond" with IMDB.com. 

I Ain't Afraid of No Facts

So, the good news, if you're a fan of interdisciplinary genre film, is that Sony has attached two writers to a possible new Ghostbusters movie. 

The bad news, if you follow such things online, is that the piss-poor horror-film media can't get the story right to save its, um ... soul.

Hollywood Reporter, as usual, is the apparent ground zero for the accurate news. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and director Ivan Reitman, are "aware of" the project. The upshot of the production: Writer-producers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, of the U.S. incarnation of The Office, are attached to the film. It is meant to be a reboot, not necessarily a direct sequel, and it will focus on a new cast. 

Fangoria eschews some detail, but jives with Hollywood Reporter. This is a new cast. Not the familiar quartet. At least, nothing is promised in that regard.

Variety, in a show of journalistic hubris, decides that having some familiar names in the Sony news is cause for a little leap of logic. Scribe Michael Fleming's second graf just plops the change in facts down: "a film designed to bring back together the original cast." Fine,  just put it out there, no attribution other than his. And then he goes on. Why stop at a sip, when one can chug at the table? "The close proximity between the writers and original Ghostbuster Ramis is evidence that the ghost chasers have sparked to the idea of returning," he writes. Oh, really? 

And then Mania and Bloody-Disgusting run ape-shit all over the news. Why do any reporting yourselves? Just copy things in there, kids. 

MANIA: Writer Jarrod Sarafin whiffs from the start, telling readers that "the studio hopes of [sic] bringing back Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson for their title roles." No attribution is given for this claim (although we know now it's from Variety). His article also ends in media res, thanks to the apparently editor-less Mania setup, but perhaps that's best. Sarafin also calls this a Columbia Pictures project, while his headline declares it a Sony project. The fact is that Columbia is owned by Sony and Sony announced the development. Sarafin should choose one, or make some distinction in the body of the text. 

BLOODY-DISGUSTING: I like how they title their news brief, "Get the eff out ... 'Ghostbusters 3' Officially Announced." I actually do. That's funny and energetic. Granted, nobody at Sony "announced" the movie is greenlighted and in production; merely that some writers have been hired to work on a script. But the headline is plausibly deniable, and it's fun. But then they drop Fleming's opinion piece into the space provided. It's literally just a copy and paste. Why there's a yellow header that reiterates what's in the article is beyond me, but there it is, getting it wrong again. At least they tell us the source of the hooey at the bottom of the article. Mania just blasts Sarafin's primitive English as if he did a little reporting or something.

The Strange Case of Guillermo Del Toro

Don't give Lovecraft to this man.

Variety reports on "Pan's Labyrinth" director Guillermo Del Toro's ridiculous project schedule, which should take him through 2017 without much time away from the lens. 

Among the projects in hand, remakes of "Frankenstein" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" for Universal. Note the message boards do not light up when films from the 1920s and 1930s are remade ... there is something about the passage of time, and the status of the original film as incontrovertible classic that seems to inure it from such commentary. (And note Variety's annoying use of the letter "U" in place of the word "Universal." Bloody-Disgusting adopts this one-letter idiocy, for some reason, while gushing. Ugh.)

He is also slated to helm an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness."

"It's the fantasy and gothic horror world Guillermo finds comfortable," Universal spokeswoman Donna Langley is quoted at Bloody-Disgusting.

Well, that's half-accurate.

While Del Toro is unquestionably a fantasy visionary, his horror films have been shaky at best. "Cronos" devolved into a mess by the time Ron Perlman hefted his first pipe-club, he lost the big-studio battle with "Mimic" from the get-go, and those are about the sum of his straightforward genre oeuvre. 

Del Toro is suited to sentimental fantasy with a twisted mythos, making him perfect for "The Hobbit" and its sequel, one supposes. And his comic book films (the Hellboy pictures, "Blade 2"), while at times groaningly sincere, are again appropriate to the subject and content. And based on the one comment about Del Toro's schedule at Mania, it's the comic book films that make the man (the poster laments the now-inevitable delay of "Hellboy 3" and a rumored Dr. Strange adaptation). 

Del Toro's strength lies in the depiction of wide-eyed and haunting worlds other than our own. And yes, such strength could carry him through (treacly) versions of Shelley's and Stevenson's source material. 

But the Lovecraft project is wrong for Del Toro, and the current apparent modus operandi of give-Del-Toro-every-genre-project he likes does not reflect his track record with the form. 

A visuals master? Yes. A capable director of the horror film: Not evidenced. And no one seems to be referencing his problematic horror projects. I guess the genre media swallowed all their Kool-Aid. 

When is a Hit Not a Hit?

Science fiction commentator Erika Nelson has a brilliant review of Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves' "Cloverfield" at her blog, Confessions of an Aspiring Science Fiction Scholar. 

Nelson maintains she heard bad things about "Cloverfield," and that kept her out of theaters. I find that fascinating, and it fuels a message-board/Web-fueled impression I've maintained of the public's reaction to film, but which  financial data refutes. 

The $25 million production grossed $80 million in the United States, and topped Martin Luther King Day weekend receipts. It went on to gross $170.5 million worldwide, and $29.1 million in DVD sales. No mean numbers. 

That being said, I tried this experiment: Google "Cloverfield, review." Here are my results: 

1. Rolling Stone: Peter Travers writes: "Now that the fanboy hype has cleared, we can see 'Cloverfield' for what it is: borrowed inspiration, trite screenwriting and amateurish acting all in the service of a ballsy idea ... "

2. Neil Cumpston posted this at Ain'tItCoolNews.com (Google finds it through KillerFilm), in which he points out the part of the film he didn't like (Cumpston seemed to enjoy the part wherein the monster "rips the living shit" out of the city): "The bad: Smarty pants story-telling shit where the video you're watching has un-recorded bits where you see the hero's relationship a few weeks back, before the monster shows up."

3. The New York Times' Manhola Dargis does some ripping of  "the living shit" of her own: "Like 'Cloverfield' itself, this new monster is nothing more than a blunt instrument designed to smash and grab without Freudian complexity or political critique, despite the tack allusions to Sept. 11."

4. TheMovieBlog.com also concedes the battle to "Cloverfield's" production values, but this reviewer, "John," is upset about the marketing campaign ("I haven't been a fan, nor am I now ...") and he echoes Cumpston's disdain for the intercut back story. "Far beyond the cheesiest of the cheese," he writes, and then "Honestly, the monster was nothing special," and furthermore, "I heard more than a few people walking out complaining about not seeing more of the monster, or more of the carnage he wrought in the movie. I can see where they're coming from."

5. Peter Sciretta at SlashFilm.com writes glowingly of the film, but also notes the hype, "can wear thin really fast, especially when you're subject them to [sic] to near-pointless online viral storylines." 

And that's the first page. It's not a scientific survey, and it even runs somewhat counter to anecdotal measurements by aggregators like RottenTomatoes.com, which ranked critics' reactions to the movie at 77 percent. 

But what I think it does indicate is that there were three threads that fed the bad rap "Cloverfield" seemed to accumulate. 

One: Viral marketing is not what it was in 1999. Consumers are savvy to it and they could dislike the notion of being manipulated by incremental information, or incidental episodes of the campaign. 

Two: Some contingent of genre audiences want little in the way of human characterization. The lowest common denominator of our adherents to the form want nothing more than a video game of violence, carnage, and special effects for 90 minutes. (This is not endemic to horror cinema, one might also propose.)

Three: Something about "Cloverfield's" visual language rubbed some people the wrong way — whether it was the size and shape of the monster, how much screentime the monster was given, or the images of destruction on the screen. 

I'm most interested in this component of public reaction. I think the anti-9/11 subtext packed into some of the negative comments about "Cloverfield" amount to a public expression of persistent discomfort with seeing New York City impacted by catastrophic events. And since what horror cinema does best is bring us to those places of discomfort, we can term any negative response to such subtext a success. Thanks for confirming the film's strength, Ms. Dargis.

What infuriates me is the combination of the first two components. The aggressive treatment of the film because of hype and marketing is a direct function of a vicious cycle. By our response to the advertising in question, we perpetuate the advertising. And advertising of film is seldom advertising any more, it is summarization. Trailers are minutes long, and contain most of the key beats of at least the first act. And we soak it up. In fact, the "Star Trek" trailer before "Cloverfield" was news on sites like Mania.com.

There is nothing worse for horror cinema than this culture of a priori relationships with the text. 

The horror film relies upon the sublimation of the audience's need for some comprehension of narrative and expected experience. Only when the audience is in the moment, unshackled from connection to a known progression of scenes, can it experience the best effect of the film. 

We live in a world in which there is no longer a news cycle. Every 24 minutes we expect the Internet to produce new information. Narrative within fiction, be it book or film, is ruthlessly exposed before release or publication. 

And for horror cinema, it is a particularly destructive phenomenon. Our inherent disappointment in the knowledge we carry into the theater is expressed as disappointment in the film. But the film never had a chance. 

The Ghost of Tobe Hooper

Hollywood Reporter claims "House of Sand and Fog" director Vadim Perelmen is lined up to helm the remake of Tobe Hooper's 1982 "Poltergeist."

This type of news typically brings the why-monsters out of the closet, and that's fine. I suppose it's a mark of a film's effect upon an audience that certain members resist the inevitable regurgitation of Hollywood.

However, I cannot understand the surprise that always accompanies such indignation.

The mark of the insane is that they perform the same action repeatedly but are persistent in their astonishment at identical results. The mark of the modern pop-culture consumer is that they return to the same cheap trough repeatedly but are persistent in their astonishment at the poor-quality of the offerings.

I've read recent blogs in the publishing world that back this idea: The market produces what the consumer purchases. Yes, that's a vicious cycle. Market and consumer dictate each other's experience, to some degree. But there is a healthy amount of don't-buy-it-and-the-market-won't-sell-it going on here. We know this is true. If the consumer world thinks the new soda is too sweet, or not sweet enough, and does not spend its money on said new soda, the drink will soon be replaced.

The bottom line is, people go see remakes. Audiences apparently identify strongly with the source material, and they will experience the new iterations either to revel in the familiarity or revel in the variation. In either case, box offices log interest, and studios pay attention to what the hard-earned dollar buys. If genre fans thought remakes were bad ideas, studios would not make them.

All this being said, and perhaps overstated, my dismay is at how "Poltergeist" — no matter how often evidence to the contrary is published — is so commonly attributed to Steven Spielberg. In any given news cycle on the film, there seems to be at least one outright reassignment of the move to Spielberg, wholesale.

Yes, Spielberg wrote the script, intruded far too much into Hooper's domain on the set, and probably put his hands on the camera here and there. But the fact remains: It's a Hooper film. And if the world of critics and consumers had given Hooper his due in 1982, we might not have watched the laudable director spiral into a decade of obscure ineffectiveness (barring 1986's excellent and supremely underrated "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2").

But Hooper was forked onto the pile in the blaze of Spielberg's "E.T." summer. It was simply too attractive a proposition: One the one hand Spielberg's direct creation of a lovable potato from outer space, on the other hand a howling ghost story pulled from the pages of National Enquirer. On some marketing level, it had to be all Spielberg. Just read the poster to the left. If I were Hooper, I'd have had a career crisis, too.

So Mania today is the guilty party, eschewing any mention of Hooper at all, calling the film "a Spielberg classic."

Bloody-Disgusting gets it right back on Aug. 19, referring to it as a Hooper-Spielberg construction, but doesn't mention who actually made the movie in today's post. Fangoria and Hollywood Reporter get it right in all cases. Ah well, two out of four ain't bad.

Your Fang's in My Vampire

HBO perpetuates what I find most annoying about pop-culture consumers' current fascination with vampires (especially in connection with the paranormal-romance vampire, unfortunately propagated by a recent spate of genre books): The linking of the myth to the movies, and the linking of the movies to an alternative lifestyle. 

In two documentaries, to coincide with its fictional series about vampires, HBO offers a look at the vampire in history, "True Bloodlines: Vampire Legends," and then the vampire in popular culture, "True Bloodlines: A New Type."

Producer Riccardo DiLoreto tells "A New Type" will take viewers into the "the vamp lifestyle," among other topics. 

No, please.

It's not that I particularly care if baby-fat softies and rail-thin social-awkwards dress like characters from "The Crow" and hang out in their living rooms sipping each other's blood from pewter goblets, it's more that the media's constant seasonal penchant for documenting these folks dilutes the actual mythological importance of the vampire in human culture. 

Furthermore, it relegates genre cinema to the ghetto, as the invariable intercutting of Max Schreck or Bela Lugosi with the hastily put-together candlelit interview sets connects — irreparably — the one to the other.

In any case, these two rehashes come to screens Sept. 6. And in another sign of the decline of good criticism of the vampire in genre cinema, Fangoria's news plug on the series refers to F.W. Murnau's 1922 "Nosferatu" as the "illegitimate silent film incarnation" of Dracula. Well, if by that the writer meant a script that largely adhered to Bram Stoker's original text and stands as the most effective depiction of the story until Herzog remade it in 1979, yes I suppose the film is just a celluloid bastard. 

Who let these guys be the mouthpiece for the form?