“The Expulsion”

20 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

“Thanks for calling CastOutCo, we’re steamin’ mad at demons. How can I help you?”

“I’m not sure whether I should be calling or not.”

Father Buck rolled his eyes, aiming another pencil at the ceiling tiles. “What seems to be the problem?”

“It’s my son. I don’t know where to turn…”

The woman started talking, and Buck made some peremptory notes, and then began doodling on the edges of his legal pad. The symptoms she was describing were fairly typical; Buck already had all the information he was likely to need, but it made the clients feel better if they were allowed to vent.

When the woman paused to take a breath, Buck jumped in. “We’re awfully swamped, but I think I can squeeze you in this afternoon at two-thirty, if that’s okay.” He glanced up at the wrestling calendar tacked to the wall of his cubicle; there was nothing written there.

“Thank you. Yes, as soon as possible.” Her voice was forceful and harsh through the phone, as though she really wanted to say, You’d better get your ass here yesterday, buster.

“See you then,” Buck said, and almost hung up, but then remembered to tack on, “Thanks for calling CastOutCo.” The woman had already rung off. Buck put the phone back in its cradle, hoping the manager hadn’t been listening in.

With a sigh, he buttoned up the shirt of his uniform, which looked like something a priest would wear if he moonlighted as a motorcycle mechanic; it was black, with a faux white collar and an embroidered name badge with a little orange cross stitched on it. Buck slid his feet off the desk and crammed his black cowboy hat onto his balding pate. He couldn’t hear a peep in the office; the other associates were probably sleeping or cruising the Internet for underage girls. Business had been tanking, and it was all thanks to Big Pharma—parents were generally unwilling to fork over obscene amounts of cash to an exorcist when they could just stuff their kid full of Ritalin.

Buck got up from his chair, causing the chair and his back to squeak in protest. He hoped this tinpot operation could stay afloat until he retired; he was too old to go pounding the pavement for work, and besides, banishing demons wasn’t really an in-demand skill in the job market these days. He sighed again, heavily, and glanced at his watch. If he left now, he’d probably have time to stop and get a beer.

At two-thirty-eight, after three beers and a bowl of nachos, Buck pulled his rickety Ford to the curb in front of the client’s house, which was a typical faceless suburban confection painted in trendy Mediterranean hues. There was a dark green minivan in the driveway, with a sticker on the back proclaiming that their kid was an Honor Student at Insufferable Brat Middle School, or some such crap. Buck scowled.

The woman had the door open before he’d even got all the way out of the car, and she looked exactly as he had expected her to: Pinched, too skinny, with meticulously styled brownish hair and high-waisted jeans. Buck smiled and raised a hand in greeting, but she just looked at him with a steely expression. He muttered under his breath as he retrieved his box of supplies from the back seat.

Once inside, the woman didn’t even offer a drink or so much as a how-do-you-do; she just marched through the maze of cream-colored hallways, leaving Buck to scuttle along behind her. She stopped on the threshold of what looked like a sitting room, and thrust her finger forward.

The boy sat stoutly in a red recliner, his feet dangling an inch or two from the floor. Behind him were the tangled wires and controls of a forgotten video game, and clutched in his hand was a half-eaten Ho-Ho. He considered his mother and the stranger with flat-lidded eyes.

“What’s the kid’s name?” Buck hissed out of the corner of his mouth.

“Logan,” the woman hissed back. Then she moved aside and let Buck into the room.

“What’s up, Logan?” Buck put his box casually on the floor at his feet. The boy glanced down at it, and then looked back at him. “Something going on I should know about?”

The kid burped, and Buck got a cloudy snootful of root beer and Ho-Ho filling and brimstone. “Who are you?” Logan asked.

I’m Spartacus, kid, who do you think? Buck smiled. “Just someone who wants to help you. My name’s Father Buck.” He wasn’t really a father to anyone or anything; he’d never even done that cheapo ordaining deal on the Internet. The titles were company policy.

Logan’s face puffed up like an egg sac and turned a livid shade of green. The exorcist ducked in case the kid was going to spew, but all that came out were words. “He doesn’t need any help, wretched human,” the kid croaked, in a voice rather reminiscent of intestinal gas. “I am in…um…complete control now.”

Buck pulled up a nearby chair and sat facing the boy. It looked like it might be a long afternoon. “And who, pray tell, might you be?”

Logan’s face deflated in an instant, and he was again a normal, contemptuous pre-teen. “You already know my name is Logan. Are you retarded or something?”

Buck sighed inwardly. The beer and nachos seemed to be having a neighborly dispute in his digestive system. “I know you’re Logan. I’m talking to the other person inside of you.”

Logan just looked at him quizzically, but then the swollen green face returned. “You’ll never free the child from our crutches…I mean clutches!” The shining red eyes glanced to the left, as though consulting an invisible someone standing just behind the recliner. Then they fixed on Buck again. “Try anything you want! Dunk me in a tank of holy water! Read me boring bits of the Bible! Stick a silver crucifix up my nose and…uh…call me Sally!” Another small burp escaped the demonic maw. “Oh! And…um…your mother wears army boots?”

On top of the indigestion, Buck’s head had begun to pound. This was exactly what he needed today; this demon was only a damn trainee. He had dealt with a few of them in his time; trainees were usually a bigger pain in the ass to exorcise than fully accredited demons. Buck reckoned it had to do with the trainees’ inexperience, their desperation to succeed at their first big possession. Trying to ignore his throbbing temples, Buck said, “Junior demon third class, I want to talk to your supervisor.”

The green face registered childlike surprise, and then quickly reverted to a grimace that was apparently supposed to be terrifying. “What are you talking about, pitiful human? I’m an all-powerful…what? No, I can do it… Oh, all right!” In an instant the petulant green visage dissolved into a much less human countenance, reddish and reptilian. Yellow eyes with cat-slit pupils regarded Buck with impatience. “Yes?” its deep, gargling-drain voice said.

Buck reached into his supply box and produced the standard-issue silver crucifix, then held it at arm’s length in front of him. “I command you and your acolyte, in the name of all that is holy, to leave the body of this boy in peace, amen, et cetera.”

The supervising demon blinked. “Yeah. Well, look, can you do me a big favor and not bust my chops here? I mean, the trainee’s gotta learn this possession jazz, right? You understand.”

Buck had expected this, so he put down the cross and retrieved a vial of holy water from the box, which he proceeded to open and sprinkle liberally onto Logan’s pudgy shins. The flesh sizzled a little, but remained unblemished. The demon rolled its eyes. “Hey, didn’t the kid just tell you that none of that stuff was going to work? You been watching too many Hammer movies or something?”

Buck pulled his worn Bible from the box and began reading from it, but he’d only got through one paragraph before the demon waved its hands for silence. “Okay, put a sock in it. I’ll make you a deal,” the supervisor growled. “Let the trainee do his possession thing, pass his test, get his certification, and then I promise we’ll leave the kid alone and go possess someone else. Would that make you happy?”

Before Buck could answer he realized that Logan’s mother had breezed into the room and was standing so close behind him that he could feel her breath riffling his hair. “Yes, Mr. Demon! Please leave Logan alone. In fact, why don’t you go possess that Taylor slut down the street? She’d probably enjoy it.”

Buck closed his eyes. The headache was starting to make him see stars. “Ma’am, if you’ll please let me handle this…”

The woman cast a furious glance down at Buck. “The demon offered a deal, and if you’re too pigheaded to take it, then I will.”

Buck was trying to explain to the woman that demons were actually not renowned for their honesty and their stringent keeping of promises, but she had already marched past him and planted herself directly in front of the demon, hands on hips, ass muscles clenched. “I agree to your compromise,” Logan’s mother intoned grandly.

“Well, hallelujah,” said the supervisor, and in a flash Logan’s face lost its lizardly appearance and reverted back to being puffy and green. “Hail Satan!” the trainee demon shouted exuberantly, then opened its froggy mouth wide and released a massive column of fire straight at Logan’s mother.

Buck instinctively shielded his eyes, but he could still feel the searing heat of the infernal flames as they consumed the woman utterly. She hadn’t even had time to scream.

When at last the heat had dissipated, leaving only a thick greasy stench like overdone pork, Buck reluctantly took his hands from his face and stared at the human-shaped tower of ash that teetered before him. When he exhaled, the tower collapsed into a cascade of papery black flakes that came to rest in a neat pile on the ecru carpet.

“Oops,” said the trainee demon.

The lizard face was back again, yellow eyes seeming to blaze like exploding suns. “Oops? Oops? Is that all you have to say for yourself? All you had to do was levitate the chair with the kid in it, maybe do a bit of freaky writing across his pasty midsection, but no! You had to go torch an innocent woman who’ll be going to heaven now, her soul lost to us forever! Junior demon third class, you fail!”

The green face returned blubbering. “But sir, it was just an accident…let me try again…”

“Try again? You’ll be lucky if I let you scrape old hoof shavings off the bottom of the Styx. Now come on!” Logan’s face went through one more horrible transformation, from reddish rage-filled lizard to sobbing greenish egg sac, and then he was just a regular boy again, his cheeks pink from exertion. His stomach rumbled and he looked down at it.

Buck was still sitting in his chair, unable to process what had just happened. A strange wind, perhaps caused by the departure of the demons, stirred the pile of ashes and scattered them in a pattern that looked sort of like an angel, if you squinted hard. Buck stuck his toe into the pile. Well, there goes my commission, he thought glumly.

Logan, who had been watching Buck’s actions with an elaborate lack of interest, took one last look at the blackened cinders that had once been his mother. Then he turned his chair toward the television, stuffed the rest of the Ho-Ho into his mouth, and picked up his video game controller.

The Goddess Revisits Season Two of “Masters of Horror”

12 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 1 Comment

Just as a quick reminder, I’ve put up a Patreon campaign to raise some much-needed funds for my writing endeavors, so take a look if you missed my previous post, and give something if you can, would you? Thank you.

Now, since I went into the specifics of “Masters of Horror” in my previous post about season one, I’m just going to jump right in and begin discussing season two, the rewatch of which I just completed. The quality of the second season of Mick Garris’s generally excellent series was a lot more consistent than the first, in the sense that there were no particularly terrible episodes, but there weren’t really any jaw-dropping, “Imprint”-quality ones either, though many of them were quite good, and all were at least decently watchable.

The season two revisit has been a little more fun for me and has provided a slightly different perspective on the show, since the God of Hellfire became interested in this fucked-up series I was obsessively watching and decided he wanted to watch some of it too. So I’ll be providing a little of his insight on the episodes, when he provided it. And now, onward.

THE DAMN GOOD

There were two episodes that, for me, stood out as being the best examples of what season two had to offer. The first was “Family,” directed by John Landis and featuring the lovable George Wendt (of “Cheers” fame) playing brilliantly against type as a suburban serial killer and corpse collector. I’m not entirely sure if the concept for this story was at least partly inspired by Miriam Allen deFord’s 1961 short story “A Death in the Family,” which it strongly reminded me of and which was made into an episode of “Night Gallery” back in 1971. John Landis’s “Family” ends up going off in a different direction entirely, though, and has a great twist ending. George Wendt imbues his schlubby, lonely bachelor psychopath with such pathos that it’s hard not to feel bad for him, even while he’s killing little girls and old ladies to deflesh and add to his happy skeletal family. Twisted, tragicomic, and great.

Norm realizes the folly of storing the hydrochloric acid on the shelf right next to the lavender bath oil.

The second standout of season two, the Rob Schmidt-directed “Right To Die,” recalled the furor over the Terri Schiavo case and starred the terrific Martin Donovan, who I’ve been a fan of since his numerous appearances in Hal Hartley’s films in the eighties and nineties. Donovan plays a dentist who has been cheating on his wife with his buxom assistant; shortly after the wife finds out, she and her wayward husband are involved in a terrible car accident in which all of the wife’s skin is burned off. Initially engaging in a legal battle with his mother-in-law for the right to turn off his wife’s life support, Dr. Adulterer soon changes his tune when it comes to light that his wife is now able to open up an enormous can of supernatural scorned-woman whoop-ass whenever she flatlines. Since I’m always down to see a cheater (and worse, as it turns out) get his just desserts, this episode was a satisfying, gory, and somewhat surprising ride.

In an attempt to be edgy, Smokey Bones new barbecue menu took things just a bit too far.

THE PRETTY DAMN GOOD

Several of the other episodes, while not quite to the caliber of the aforementioned, were still reliably entertaining. “Sounds Like,” directed by Brad Anderson from a short story by Mike O’Driscoll, was in the words of the GoH “like a really, really good ‘Twilight Zone’ episode,” and recounted the sad tale of a suburban middle-manager type guy who loses his son to a rare heart condition and subsequently develops hypersensitive hearing that eventually drives him insane. Very low-key in the gross-out department, but a nice slow burn of suspense and escalating tension.

“Pro-Life,” John Carpenter’s taut tale of a determined, fifteen-year-old pregnant girl and a demonic battle in a besieged abortion clinic, was also pretty fantastic, with Ron Perlman giving a chilling performance as the girl’s fundie nutbag father. Intense, violent, and genuinely frightening, even if the whole “devil-baby” angle is a touch cheesy.

Dario Argento’s “Pelts” was the Italian maestro’s second contribution to the series, adapted from a short story by F. Paul Wilson. The somewhat ridiculous premise sees a fur trader (played by Meat Loaf!) getting his hands on some beautiful raccoon pelts that magically make everyone who works with them do unbelievably gory things to themselves that mirror what was done to the dead animals. Squicky, over the top (it IS Argento, after all), and lots of fun.

He would do anything for love, including giving you the shirt off his back, or the skin off his torso, or something.

The Joe Dante-directed “Screwfly Solution,” while not nearly as stupidly overblown as his first-season “Homecoming,” still tackled hot-button sociopolitical issues (feminism and male aggression, in this case), but in a far less obnoxious way than his first foray in the series. I thought it was still a bit too glib and a tad on the overly obvious side for my taste, but overall I quite enjoyed it, and the GoH chose it as his favorite episode of season two, so in deference to him I decided to place it in the “pretty damn good” category. The GoH is a big fan of apocalyptic-type scenarios in horror that are just barely plausible, so this tale of an unknown biological agent that ramps up male hostility to the point where the men are killing off all the women on earth, was right up his alley and scared him more than any of the other episodes. Also, SPOILER ALERT, it was aliens all along, and aliens are pretty much the GoH’s favorite thing in the whole wide galaxy, you guys; you don’t even know. I forgot to add that this episode featured both Jason “90210” Priestley AND Elliott “M.A.S.H.” Gould as high-echelon environmental scientists, which is probably something you can’t say about any other movie in history. So there’s that.

Also decent was “We All Scream for Ice Cream,” directed by Tom Holland from a short story by John Farris (with a teleplay by the great David J. Schow). Bearing shades of Stephen King’s It, this straightforward tale of supernatural revenge sees a mentally-slow but well-liked (and clown-clad) ice cream man “accidentally” killed by some miscreant children. Years later, a sinister ice cream van prowls the small town’s streets at night, seeking to revisit the sins of the fathers upon the sons, as it were. Well-executed and fairly creepy.

Rounding out the “pretty damn good” category, Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of “The Black Cat” featured Jeffrey Combs as a tormented Edgar Allan Poe living out (or is he?) a couple of his more famous short stories. I thought the ending was something of a cop-out, but I’ll forgive it (this time) because the performances and gore were solid (BAD KITTY!) and the episode as a whole was pretty great, with some brilliant comic touches. Likewise with “The Washingtonians,” directed by Peter Medak from a short story by Bentley Little. The premise was so utterly bizarre, and the execution so overdone and absurd, that it circled all the way around to being awesome again. Intensely gory, and one of the funniest—and easily the wackiest—episodes of the series.

American History Blechs.

Also quite good was the final episode, Norio Tsuruta’s “Dream Cruise.” Glacially paced, and pretty standard J-horror all around (complete with long-haired female wraith), but with a story that held a few surprises, lovely cinematography, and a nice creep factor. A worthy end to the series.

THE JUST OKAY AND THE DISAPPOINTING

A few of the episodes, while not bad per se, were just not as good as I was expecting, given the talent involved. As much as I adore the stories of Ambrose Bierce, for example, the Tobe Hooper-directed adaptation of “The Damned Thing” (with a teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson, no less) was not particularly engaging or memorable, making me question the decision to make it the inaugural episode of the second season.

masters-of-horror-serie-tv-s-2-the-damned-thing-04-g

You cursed brat! Look what you’ve done! I’m melting! Melting!

Also a disappointment, and for similar reasons, was “Valerie on the Stairs,” directed by series creator Mick Garris from a terrific short story by Clive Barker. I’m a huge fan of Barker’s stories and novels, but his fantastical creations are somewhat hit or miss when adapted to screen, and this one seemed more miss than hit. Tony “Candy Man” Todd played a fetching demon, and Christopher Lloyd was his pleasingly manic self, but the episode seemed flimsy, slightly repetitive, and a tad silly, with an anticlimactic ending let down by cheesy special effects.

The Mick Garris-directed “The V Word” (and I hate to say it, but Garris was kind of 0 for 3 on his own episodes of the series he created, in my opinion) was not a total waste of time, but not an experience I’d care to revisit, either. The V could have stood for literally anything else—vagina, perhaps, or velveteen, or vivisection, or even Vivian Vance, for fuck’s sake—and I would have enjoyed it more, but since the V stood for “vampire” (oh…those), I was less than enthused, especially when whiny teenage boys were added into the mix. Watchable, but overall, meh.

Soooooooooooo high.

And thus completes my revisited rundown of “Masters of Horror!” Agree? Disagree? Care to start a virtual fistfight over which were the best episodes? Let me know. Until then, as ever, Goddess out.

The Goddess Extends Her Tin Cup Like a Dickens Orphan

12 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Please, sir, may I have…more?

I know that somewhere deep in their black little hearts, the readers of this humble little blog (all three of them) have lain awake nights, wondering, “What can I, as a debased fan of a relatively unknown horror writer, do to contribute to the cause of evil in the world?” (or words to that effect). Well, I’m pleased to announce that, for less than the price of a vanilla bean frappuccino per month, you can give something to the horror community that might, one day, get you something vile and wonderful and meaningful to your interests. What that something is, I’m not entirely sure, but just roll with me here.

That’s right, like many other money-grubbing denizens of the internets, I have put up a Patreon campaign to scare up funds for my illustrious writing career. There are five tiers you may participate in to subsidize my terrible activities, and there are lots of little rewards you can collect on depending on the amount pledged, so you won’t feel like you’re gettin’ nothin’ for your contributions.

So please help, if you can. Any amount, however small, can make a difference. It’s just like the saying goes: Be the change you want to see in the world, or it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, or nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, or something. Now join me in a chorus of “Kumbaya” and throw a couple bucks my way. Thank you, and good day, sirs and ma’ams.

The Goddess Revisits Season One of “Masters of Horror”

7 Jan 201519 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 2 Comments

We’re now in 2015, believe it or not, and jokes about when we can expect to be receiving our hoverboards aside, hopefully it will be a better one than the last. I realize I’ve been neglecting this blog a little, but as with most of you, I was busy over the holidays with just general holiday stuff as well as some of the more personal issues I briefly mentioned in a previous post, and I just never got around to updating this thing as often as I should have. But I’m resolving to do better, and to that end, I’ve decided to do something slightly different with my Favorite Horror Scenes series by discussing the 2005 television show created by Mick Garris, “Masters of Horror” (all episodes of which are available on Hulu for free, if you somehow missed them). This year marks the tenth anniversary of the show’s debut, so it seemed an opportune time for another run-through.

I distinctly remember there being a lot of buzz about this series in the horror community when it was first announced. I mean, these were going to be hour-long, uncensored, hardcore horror films based on stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale! Directed by legends like John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, Dario Argento! AND IT WAS ALL GONNA BE ON TV, YOU GUYS. Pay TV, sure, but TV nonetheless. There had really never been anything quite like it on television before, and I for one eagerly settled in to watch the moment it was available online.

At the time I enjoyed most of them quite a bit, though I found that ten years later very few of them had made a lasting impression. I had forgotten even some of the better episodes, so it was instructive to watch them all again, and gratifying that many of them were far better than I had remembered.

Just a pale wingless angel taking his eyeless Japanese man out for walkies, no biggie.

THE GOOD:

Case in point: Episode eight, the John Carpenter-directed “Cigarette Burns.” I hadn’t remembered anything about this episode at all, but on the rewatch it instantly moved into my top three of season one. A great deal of my enthusiasm may be due to the presence of Norman Reedus, who of course in subsequent years went on to megastardom for his role on “The Walking Dead,” but everything in this episode hit the right notes for me this time around. Udo Kier was his wonderful scene-chewing self as a reclusive squintillionaire who hires a man to procure the single remaining print of a mysterious film called La Fin Absolue du Monde, the first and only screening of which ended in madness and murder. There is genuine suspense, an eerie, menacing tone permeating the whole enterprise, and gore galore, including a memorable moment in which Udo Kier’s character threads his own intestines through the projector after his long-awaited viewing of the cursed film. Top notch.

Also very good and worth a mention: The Stuart Gordon-directed “Dreams in the Witch-House,” which very effectively captured the spooky, otherworldly feel of the Lovecraft tale it was based upon. There was also John Landis’s “Deer Woman,” which I remembered disliking the first time around but appreciated much more this time. It’s far more black comedy than straight horror, with a rather absurdist premise based on a Native American legend, but there was plenty of blood, and Brian Benben’s snark-spitting protagonist was hilarious. Lastly, and surprisingly, was Dario Argento’s “Jenifer,” which starred Steven Weber (who also wrote the teleplay, based on a Bruce Jones story). I’ve always been a big Argento fan, but I think we can all agree that his more recent output has been somewhat less than stellar. This episode, though, is quite decent, even though it honestly could have been directed by anyone. It dragged a bit in parts, but the story—about a man being slowly bewitched by a deformed succubus—was suitably disquieting, and the gore was nicely excessive.

The tragic consequence of epic beer goggles.

THE BAD:

Episodes I could have done without included, sadly, Mick Garris’s contribution to his own groundbreaking series. “Chocolate” had a flimsy story, lame execution, and just an overall feel of why-bother-ness. Boo. The only other episode I found unforgivable was Joe Dante’s “Homecoming.” Zombies as political satire can be done well, but this came across as so heavy-handed as to be utterly ridiculous, even though I happen to agree with the film’s political stance. Added to that is the fact that the subject matter, current at the time, now comes across as terribly dated and not very relatable. Thea Gill’s ballbusting Ann-Coulter-alike was amusing (and her fate at the end satisfying), but otherwise, damn, tone it down some. You can actually make a point without smashing us upside the head with a wrecking ball, y’know.

He returned from the dead to vote, but the miracle of his resurrection was nothing in the face of Diebold.

THE OKAY:

I enjoyed most of the others, though they didn’t stand out as much as they probably could have. The David J. Schow-written, Larry Cohen-directed “Pick Me Up” was pretty good, with a decent premise (competing serial killers), some genuinely tense scenes, and the always-welcome presence of Fairuza Balk. “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road,” directed by Don Coscarelli from a story by Joe R. Lansdale, was also very watchable and included a fantastic turn by Angus “Tall Man” Scrimm. Lucky McKee’s “Sick Girl” was creepy-crawly fun, with a pleasingly awkward performance by Angela Bettis as a lovelorn lesbian entomologist. The Clive Barker adaptation “Haeckel’s Tale,” directed by John McNaughton, was good, but could have been better given the source material. Same with “Dance of the Dead,” which, given the status of all those involved—story by Richard Matheson, teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson, direction by Tobe Hooper, the appearance of Robert Englund as a depraved club owner— should have been incredible, but instead was just serviceable and somewhat disjointed. “The Fair-Haired Child,” finally, was entertaining but ultimately not all that memorable.

You would tell me if I had something on my forehead, right?

THE AMAZING:

You didn’t actually think I was going to leave this one off, did you? Slated to air as the last episode of season one, Takashi Miike’s “Imprint” was already notorious well before its air date, because Showtime (who carried the series) refused to broadcast it, due to its highly disturbing subject matter and intensely graphic violence. It was released to DVD in the latter part of 2006, and is now available on Hulu as part of the regular series. It’s easy to see why Showtime balked (even though they should have known what to expect from Miike, frankly), but it’s also sort of a shame, because this is the best episode of the series by a mile.

Komomo realized, upon reflection, that bobbing for knitting needles was perhaps not the best idea she’d ever had.

Pretty much the entirety of the story takes place inside a Japanese brothel, where an American journalist (played by Billy Drago) has traveled in search of the great love of his life, a prostitute named Komomo who he had promised to rescue and take back to America. Instead, he finds another prostitute with a disfigured face who tells him the increasingly convoluted tale of what happened to the doomed Komomo. The flashback scenes of Komomo’s torture (for supposedly stealing the madam’s jade ring) are horrific, and even a seasoned horror hound like myself could barely get through them, wincing and turning my head away more than once (and yes, you may call me a weenie all you like, but aaaaaaggggggghhhhhhhhh). Additionally, the deformed girl’s recounting of her own wretched childhood, particularly the scenes of her mother dumping aborted fetuses out of a bucket into a stream, were intensely uncomfortable for me, since I had been through my own abortion only a few weeks prior and was still feeling a little strange about it. At the end of the episode, I felt as though I had been run over by a bus, in a good way, if that makes any sense. The best horror should, after all, shake you out of your complacency, and touch you in places where you’d rather not be touched. “Imprint” succeeded on that score in motherfucking spades. A genius piece of filmmaking, but one I probably won’t watch again for another ten years or so, if ever.

Hopefully you enjoyed this rundown! I’m on the third episode of my season two revisit, so keep watching this space for another fun summary to come. Until then, happy 2015, and Goddess out.

A Brief Holiday Reminder

17 Dec 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

A Short Update Just To Assure You Guys That I Haven’t Forgotten About This Blog, Dammit

9 Dec 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I apologize for my slackitude vis a vis posting new material recently, but as the wise graphic above makes clear, sometimes life gets all up in your bootyhole and makes things difficult. In the Goddess’s case, said life interferences included an unexpected pregnancy that ultimately didn’t work out, a rotten cold that sat on my head for two weeks, went away for a week and then returned with a vengeance, and another illness in the GoH’s family. Needless to say, I haven’t spent a great deal of time out of bed in the last couple of months, and I haven’t felt like doing much at all, save for watching marathons of MST3K and Rifftrax episodes and having endless cups of lemon and honey tea brought to me by the GoH. In another few days I should hopefully be back to my sparkling, healthy self, so please be patient.

In the meantime, you can always pick up a copy of my novel Red Menace if you haven’t already, and you can also look forward to the upcoming release of my first non-fiction book, The Mammoth Mountain Poltergeist, co-authored with the GoH himself. More news as it happens. Until next time, Goddess out.

The Goddess’s Favorite Creepy Movie Scenes, or Kin To A Mannequin

20 Nov 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I’ve talked on this blog before about the concept of the “uncanny valley,” how things that look almost like humans—but not quite—are intensely disturbing to most of us. I think this aspect of human psychology is one reason why horror films featuring dolls, dummies, realistic robots and the like are so common, and more often than not, end up being pretty effectively scary. With that in mind, today I’d like to discuss a lesser-known gem from the 1970s that does something a little different with that tried and true horror standby: creepy dolls, or in this case, creepy mannequins. (And no, I’m not referring to that Crow T. Robot favorite starring Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall, so get that out of your mind right now.)

While the underrated Tourist Trap (1979) may fall into the very common horror genre of “group of sexy teenagers gets lost in a remote area, slaughter ensues,” its premise is actually fairly weird and its imagery creepily effective; even its goofball musical score lends to its offbeat charm. The five young people in question have been driving through the desert to some unspecified vacation destination, utilizing two vehicles. The first vehicle, containing Woody (Keith McDermott) and his girlfriend Eileen (Robin Sherwood) gets a flat, and Woody blithely rolls the likewise flat spare tire off to find a gas station. We see him enter what appears to be an abandoned store, calling out for service. He hears something in the back, and because this is a horror movie, he goes to investigate. He sees what appears to be a person under a blanket, but when he touches the person the blanket falls away revealing a freaky-looking and apparently spring-loaded mannequin. Then shit starts to go REALLY awry, as more cackling mannequins start popping out of closets and in through windows, the door locks by itself, chairs and other furniture start rattling around like in one of those poltergeist videos on YouTube. A cabinet starts opening and closing, and then glass bottles start flying out and smashing all around Woody’s head, and the fun part is, he can’t move, because his arm is through a hole in the door and someone seems to be holding him in place. At last, an iron bar that’s been shimmying around on the floor shoots toward Woody and impales him through the side. It’s an unsettling scene, and effective because you’re not quite sure what’s going on here…is there some supernatural force at work? Or does some killer get off on setting up elaborate pranks like some kind of murderous funhouse?

Well, are you having fun yet?

We sort of find out what’s up as the story progresses. Eileen gets a ride with the second vehicle in the caravan when it passes by, and the four remaining vacationers head off in search of the wayward Woody. They see a sign pointing toward some sketchy-looking museum and surmise that he must have gone that-a-way, but before they get there, their Jeep also breaks down in a clearing. As the sole male, Jerry (Jon Van Ness) gets stuck trying to figure out what’s wrong while the women wander off and naturally end up skinny dipping in a lovely waterfall-fed pool that’s hidden back in the woods. As they thrash around all naked and gratuitous, they notice that a kindly-looking but shotgun-wielding old man is watching them from the bank, with much amusement. From just above his down-home overalls, his pretty mouth tells them that his name is Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors), that he runs the little museum they saw the sign for earlier, and that no one has really been around there since the new highway got put in and he’s really kind of bummed out about it. He actually seems a pretty nice fella, and he doesn’t seem to mind that the girls are sloughing their boobies through his pond, though he warns them that they should probably get out before it gets dark because the pond is full of water moccasins. He then heads back into the woods as the women make Mr. Yuck faces at each other and haul ass out of the snake-water.

The look of a woman who just imagined what it would feel like to have a poisonous serpent swim up her jacksie.

When they get back to the car, Mr. Slausen is helping Jerry with the Jeep. He says he needs his tools from the house, and offers to give the youngsters something to drink and a place to chill out if they’ll all just pile into his truck and come back to his house/museum. Red flag? Sure, but Slausen does seem like a genuinely nice man, and he actually hasn’t done anything the least bit sinister, so even though the kids are a little reluctant, they end up going with him, because there would be no movie if they didn’t.

And here we finally get to the creepy-ass part of the flick, because Slausen’s little house is just full of kinda-cool-but-also-fairly-disturbing animatronic mannequins. Some of them are gunslingers that turn and shoot at each other, one is a pretty lady in a white dress tucked into a lighted shrine that turns out to be a representation of his late, much-adored wife. It’s initially sort of weird, but the way Slausen talks about his wife and breaks down crying is so sincere that at least one of the women, Molly (Jocelyn Jones), really starts to feel bad for him.

Portrayed: Daddy issues.

Of course, you can see where this is going. One by one, the youngsters wander off alone for one reason or another and get either straight-up murdered or taken captive by a heavyset dude in a wig and an eerie-looking mannequin mask. It’s here that the movie is really at its most effective, because the killer, as well as the shadowed shots of the mannequins, are intensely skin-crawling. It’s also worth noting that the killer, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, has telekinetic powers, and can sic mannequins on people and make their mouths drop open in a really, REALLY unsettling way.

Like so.

Although for the bulk of the movie’s running time, you’re meant to believe that it’s Slausen’s crazy brother who has suddenly snapped and started offing people and adding them to his mannequin collection, viewers will not be surprised to learn that it was actually Slausen doing the killin’ all along.

This is actually a good look for him.

Despite the movie’s obvious telegraphing, the whole atmosphere of the thing is what makes it great, and I have to say that Chuck Connors puts in a really noteworthy performance here, since his character really does believably seem like a sweet but slightly addled old man who then turns out to be a raging psycho by the end. Though he gets his just desserts at the hands of Final Girl Molly (who was of course the most prudish of the group, and also the one who showed the most compassion for Slausen), the closing scene makes it clear that Molly was all but broken by her horrible experience, as she tools down the highway in a convertible with a freaky grin on her face AND THE MANNEQUINS OF ALL HER DEAD FRIENDS IN THE CAR WITH HER. So yeah. The 70s were a strange time, kids.

A strange time with excessive amounts of strange drugs.

Until next time, keep reading, keep watching, and try to keep away from any run-down mannequin-centric museums, okay? Until next time, Goddess out.

What’s Scarier in a Horror Movie: Realism or Supernaturalism? Also, The Goddess Picks Her Top 20 Scariest Supernatural Films

6 Nov 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I have loved the horror genre for as long as I can remember, and I have been a skeptic of the supernatural for almost as long. But therein lies an interesting contradiction, for as regular readers of this blog will no doubt have gathered, I am most often frightened by horror films featuring supernatural elements, particularly ghosts, demons/the Devil, and witches, even though I emphatically do not believe that any of those things exist.

Why should this be? Logically, you would assume that people in general would be most terrified by a film that portrays something that could actually happen, or that they at least believe could actually happen. By this criteria, for example, movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hostel, Wolf Creek, or The Last House on the Left, by virtue of being realistic, should be far scarier than anything that features a white-clad wraith drifting through the halls of a decaying Victorian mansion.

This is not so in my case, and I’m curious as to whether it’s true with other fans of horror. Please do not take this to mean that I’m not a fan of more realistic horrors, because I definitely am. I do not, however, find these movies particularly frightening, and I’ve always wondered why. Why should I be so disturbed by situations and images in film that I’m certain will never happen to me in real life? Is it because I have a greater handle on reality than I do on my own subconscious? Is it simply because I’m more terrified by the unknown than the known-but-horrible? I’d really like some insight into this conundrum, so here’s a poll that you may participate in if you’re so inclined:

Also, if you’d care to expound upon any theories as to why you feel the way you do about the horror movies that scare you the most, then please share them in the comments, because I really am curious and would like to get a discussion going.

And now, because I want to, I present a collage of my Top 20 Scariest Supernatural Movies, in no particular order. How many can you identify? Again, answer in the comments! Until next time, Goddess out.

Another excerpt from “Red Menace”

5 Nov 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Hey kids, it’s me again, reminding you that my book Red Menace is available for your reading pleasure, both in ebook and print formats from Amazon, and ebook format directly from Damnation Books. Read the excerpt below! Buy the book! Read it, love it, write a review. Thank you, my lovelies.

Paige’s eyes snapped open in the darkness. She didn’t know what time it was, only that there was no faint sign of dawn yet showing through the windows—and that Daniel was sleeping deeply beside her, his body heavily still.

Just before she had awakened, she was having a horrible dream where she was sitting in the balcony of a dimmed concert hall, looking expectantly at the stage below, which was bathed in the glow from the red footlights. An orchestra was arrayed on the stage, though Paige couldn’t see any of their faces because they all wore red hoods. The effect of the crimson light on the similarly colored hoods was unsettling, making the movement of the fabric seem turgid, liquid, like slowly draining blood.

At last, the orchestra raised their instruments as one body. The music stilled Paige’s heart for several beats. It was an infernal music, and in the dream, Paige thought of a story she had once read about a violinist who had sold his soul to the devil to be able to play like a virtuoso, only to send everyone who heard him spiraling into madness. Surely this orchestra was just as miraculous in their command of tone and timbre, in their deft manipulation of the snaking harmonies, but the miracle, if it was one, was of a satanic nature, just like in the violinist story, welling up from the darkest recesses of the soul. Paige wanted to scream but could not, wanted to cover her ears but could not move her arms. She was rendered motionless by the music, a stone carving from which a trapped consciousness peered out helplessly.

At the crescendo of the piece, just when Paige felt that she could not listen anymore, all the musicians upon the stage turned toward her in unison, the movement causing their hoods to fall back with soft and somehow obscene whispers that could still be clearly heard, though the din of the music carried on uninterrupted. Their faces were all white, grinning skulls, the black of their multitudinous eye sockets made even blacker by the wavering scarlet light, their expressions seeming to mock her.

She suddenly did scream then, feeling the stretch of her lips, the vibration of the sound in her dream-throat just as she would in waking life, though nothing emerged but silence. She just had time to glance down at the audience and see that they had all turned toward her too, accusing her with their skeleton eyes, and then she woke, her breath catching in her throat, making her cough. Daniel stirred a little but then turned onto his side and resumed snoring. Paige’s eyes struggled to identify familiar shapes in the darkness, a curtain rod or light fixture she could focus on so that she wasn’t seeing the endless parade of red-tinted skull faces peering at her with their empty yet somehow malevolent gazes.

As her heart rate calmed, she reflected on the sound that had surely wakened her. Even in the bare, few seconds after launching out of sleep, she heard a telltale echo throughout the house, the remnants of a solid sound that had not issued from her mind, however rattled. The sound could not have been very loud, or it would have woken Daniel also. Paige lay very still, feeling sweat pooling in the hollow of her stomach, straining her ears for the slightest noise.

An interminable stretch of time passed, and Paige began to think the sound had been a product of her fervid imagination after all. She closed her eyes, reluctantly settling back into sleep mode, but then she heard it—a tiny, slight wheeze, like the breath of a mouse behind the walls. Paige wondered what it could be, and as she frowned out at the surrounding darkness, the other sound came—the devilish music of the skeleton orchestra. She leaped out of bed and was halfway to the door of the bedroom before her brain even registered the movement of her body. Daniel was awake now too, his voice thick with sleep, calling her name, but Paige was already out the door and climbing the stairs to the attic room, two at a time. Some part of her must have instinctively known that the horrible sound was coming from the clock in the black room, but it was only now, as she reached the landing, that she became consciously aware of it. Just as she did, the chime came again—a deafening and doom-laden gong seemingly accompanied by the combined screams of all the tormented souls in hell.

The thought of that coffin-tall clock singing its malevolent song to the gleeful audience of that one red-windowed eye in the otherwise abandoned black room filled Paige with a horror that compelled her quickly down the hall and through the door of Helena’s attic aerie, not caring if the old woman thought she’d gone right off her rocker. She just wanted that fucking clock to stop.

Paige tore into the attic room, intending to march straight into the Red Death suite and smash the clock’s smug face with her bare hands; however, she stopped dead in her tracks at the strange sight of Helena, sitting upright and cross-legged on her narrow bed in a small circle of lamp light, her eyes closed, her ogre face bearing the serene expression of a stone Buddha. She was dimly aware of Daniel’s presence behind her, and she felt his breath upon her neck. As she stared at Helena, the echoes of the horrible chimes danced all around them, like whispering little caper-demons scurrying for the corners and concealing their evil laughter behind tiny, clawed red hands. Then, the chime came once again, full and resonant, seeming to shake the house to its foundations. Paige clapped her hands over her ears the way she had been unable to do in her dream, even though this had the awful effect of making the sound closer, more intimate, as if it was coming from inside her own head.

When the last of the chimes had finally died away, Paige cautiously drew her hands away from her ears, listening to the silence that now seemed like the world’s sweetest music. After a moment, she realized her cheeks were wet; the tears had spilled without her knowledge. She stared at Helena’s blissful figure, feeling exhausted, empty, and suddenly afraid.

The old woman’s eyes opened, and the fishy, white one twirled in its socket while the normal eye fixed on Paige, a shimmering jade-green jewel in the lamp light. Helena smiled her sunken smile. “I was afraid it wouldn’t work anymore,” she said.

The Goddess’s Favorite Creepy Movie Scenes, or Evil E.T.’s Eggcellent Adventure

3 Nov 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 2 Comments

I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of the sci-fi genre or of horror/sci-fi crossovers. There are some exceptions, of course—the Alien franchise, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers—but on the whole, aliens are not really compelling baddies for me. So it was with some degree of meh-ness, on Halloween night, that I agreed to give a lesser-known British sci-fi horror flick from the 80s a whirl; the film was the God of Hellfire’s pick for the evening (our other two Halloween screenings included more traditional horrors, The Omen and The House That Dripped Blood, in case you wondered). Despite my initial trepidation, though, I have to say that I am now rather glad that the GoH exposed me to this hidden gem, because I would have likely never sought it out on my own, and it is deeply, intensely fucked up, but in the best possible way.

Released in 1983, the bewilderingly-titled Xtro was directed by Harry Bromley Davenport, and was presumably made to cash in on the wave of popular sci-fi films of the period, like E.T., Alien, and Videodrome. It was pretty resoundingly panned on its first release, but became something of a cult film in the ensuing years, spawning two sequels so far (though the sequels don’t have much of anything to do with the original movie). It’s not difficult to see why the film slowly found an audience, because there is some very, very strange shit going on in this thing, and though it’s a fairly low-budget affair, the special effects are actually quite good for the time, and some of the imagery is pretty disturbing.

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, BUT IS THERE ANY WAY I COULD MAYBE GET A RIDE TO THE CHIROPRACTOR?

Xtro tells the story of a boy named Tony (Simon Nash) who is playing with his dad Sam (Philip Sayer) in the yard of their farmhouse when suddenly an intense light blazes out of the sky and apparently drags Sam away with it. Cut to three years later. No one really knows what happened to Sam, but Tony and his mom Rachel (Bernice Stegers) have had to move on with their lives, and now live in London with Rachel’s new boyfriend Joe (Danny Brainin) and a hot French nanny named Analise (Mariam d’Abo), who was presumably shoehorned into the film to provide the requisite titty shots.

Meanwhile, a light shines out in the woods again. Two people driving down a dark country road hit a freaky-looking creature with their car (in one of the movie’s creepier scenes, and in fact one that made the rounds on YouTube labeled as a “real” monster sighting), and stupidly go into the woods to try to find it. The creature kills the man, goes back to the car and takes care of the woman, then circles around to a house. It attacks the woman living within and impregnates her. Her belly swells to gargantuan proportions in minutes, and then a fully-grown, blood-slick Sam comes crawling out of her monumentally wrecked vagina. After heading back into the woods and stealing the clothes off the car-driving dude he killed, Sam heads to London to try and track down his family.

Here’s where the whole thing gets a little more bizarre. Sam picks up Tony from school, so when Rachel comes to get the boy, she is told that his father has already taken him. She chases them down, and sees that Sam has indeed returned. She’s glad to see him, but angry that he seemingly left them three years earlier with no explanation. He says that he doesn’t remember anything about what happened, so Rachel feels bad for him and takes him back home. Tony is overjoyed to have his father back, but naturally Joe, the new boyfriend, is far less enthused, especially when it becomes clear that Sam doesn’t really have any intention of leaving and Rachel doesn’t have the heart to tell him to take a hike. Joe eventually sort-of moves out, though he’s still sharing the photography studio where he and Rachel both work.

So it’s all a very awkward family drama into which more weirdness soon manifests itself. Tony wakes up in the middle of the night covered in blood that isn’t his. The next day he catches his father eating the eggs of his pet snake, has a freakout, and hauls ass out of the house. Sam chases after him, reassures him that everything is fine and that he just needed to eat those eggs because he’s different now, and wouldn’t Tony like to be different too? Tony seems to relent, because hey, that’s his long-lost dad, so Sam creepily puts his lips on the kid’s neck and either starts sucking blood from him or inserting something into the blister he makes there.

HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU, DON’T DRINK SO MUCH RED TEMPERA PAINT BEFORE BED???

ALIEN DADS WHO GIVE THEIR SONS HICKEYS: NEXT ON MAURY.

Later on, back at home, Sam tells his son that he has powers now, and can pretty much do anything he wishes to do, and that now Tony can too. Predictably, the first thing the kid uses his powers for is revenge: Tony’s pet snake escapes and turns up in the apartment of their busybody downstairs neighbor (played by Anna Wing), who chops the hapless reptile into pieces. Tony uses his newfound alien magic to animate a toy soldier and make it grow life-size, so that it can troop down to the busybody’s flat and poke her to death with a bayonet. It’s a weird, unsettling scene, not least because it doesn’t make much sense, and also because the actor playing the life-size toy soldier has some creepily inhuman movements to go with his plastic, unmoving face.

KNOWING HOW TO STAB YOUR NEIGHBORS IS HALF THE BATTLE.

Tony also brings one of his clown dolls to life in the form of a sinister little person (Peter Mandell) who does his bidding. When Rachel decides to take Sam back to the farmhouse to see if he remembers anything about the night he disappeared, she leaves Tony in the care of the often-shirtless nanny. Analise wastes no time in inviting her boyfriend over for some afternoon delight, but Tony keeps pounding on the bedroom door, insisting she play hide and seek with him. Finally she agrees to a short game and begins searching the apartment for the boy, at which point Tony and his creepy clown henchman hit her on the head with a mallet and then drag her into the kitchen, where we later see that she has been attached to the wall in some sort of cocoon. Squishy eggs are squelching out of an ovipositor-type tube where the bottom half of her body was. The clown midget takes these eggs and places them lovingly in the refrigerator after coating the inside with some lumpy green goop. Analise’s boyfriend, by the way, is first chased and shot at by a toy tank, then attacked and eaten by a black panther that is inexplicably wandering the halls. Because aliens.

PREPARE TO TASTE TINY HELL.

Back at the farmhouse, Rachel and Sam are going at it, but suddenly Rachel notices that Sam’s skin is starting to rot off. He takes off into the woods toward a bright light, and Rachel runs after him. Joe has brought Tony out to the farmhouse after he finds the kid running around outside the apartment alone and everybody else dead. Sam starts alien-ing like crazy, turning back into the creature we saw at the beginning. He makes a high-pitched shriek that apparently ruptures something in Joe’s brain, killing him. Then Sam gets to the light, and he has Tony with him, and Tony is starting to alien out too, hand in hand with his dad, and then they both disappear and Rachel is standing there in the field where the light just was, wondering what the fuck just happened. She doesn’t wonder long, though, because later on, she gets back to the apartment, finds the eggs in the upturned fridge, stupidly picks one up and stares at it until a little hand thing shoots out of it and attaches itself to her face and kills her.

IN 1980’S ENGLAND, OMELET EATS YOU.

So everybody dies, pretty much, except for Sam and Tony, who I guess live happily ever after on some alien planet far away, where they fill their days with telepathic toy control, big cat training regimens, and reptile-egg feasts. Did I mention this was a weird-ass movie? It’s kind of like a low-rent Cronenberg flick, what with all the goop and tentacles and vaginal imagery and creatures with backwards legs and what not, and even though the guy who played Joe kept reminding me of a lost member of the Romantics, I actually enjoyed the thing a great deal more than I thought I would. As I said, some of the images—the first sight of the creature scuttling across the dark road, the full-grown man emerging from the woman’s torn hoo-ha, the eerily grinning clown doll come to life—are really effective, and I quite liked the very downbeat, bleak drama of the whole family dynamic, which I guess is pretty typical of British films. It’s definitely an odd little film, but one that I’d recommend to fans of the genre. And with that, until next time, Goddess out.