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?