Gravid With Decay: Issue #1
Welcome to Gravid With Decay, a short, occasional newsletter by John Tolva about all things horror.
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When I was a tyke my family would vacation in a tiny town in Wisconsin called Montello. We’d sleep and eat on the floor of an unfurnished apartment (because, I think, my dad partially owned the building for some reason). But mostly we’d fish on the lake. It’s where my grandmother taught me to thread a worm on a hook, not get stung by a catfish, and tolerate stretches of intense boredom. It’s also where I learned that certain dogs cannot distinguish between a grassy lawn and a water surface covered in algae, leading inevitably to hilarious wet doggo pratfalls.
What I remember most about Montello, however, is that the lake was manmade, a flooded depression backing up to a dam, and that there was a submerged house in the middle of the lake just sitting on the bottom. Montello was formerly a granite mining town, so when the dam was built there was a ready source of material to fill it. Apparently it was also cheaper to fill the lone house-to-be-flooded with granite than move or raze it, so the engineers anchored it with rock and let the water flow.
But here’s the thing: if you swam out to the middle of the lake you could stand on top of the chimney that came up just a few feet shy of the surface. This creeped me the hell out. Just the idea that you were on top of a full-on home in the middle of the lake was weird enough. But the water was murky and, well, who knows what could come up out of that chimney? Or if you fell in, Santa heads to Davy Jones’ Locker. My mind raced with what it might be like in that home filled with rocks. Could you go inside? Was there still wallpaper up? Was it haunted?
And this is why the movie The Deep House was a satisfying scare for me. The premise is simple: haunted house but underwater. The two settings are a perfect match: dark, thickly atmospheric, never know what’s around the next turn, a constant urge to get out/up. The plot’s simple too, which is probably a necessity given the production challenge of filming it all. Two YouTubers think they have found their ticket to a million likes as they are made aware of a flooded house at the bottom of a lake. Of course, the house, which among other unsettling aspects is not falling apart as much as something normally would underwater, is full of terrors. Lucky for us, these apparently wealthy wannabe Internet celebs have crazy advanced dive gear — full radio-linked face masks, an underwater drone, shoulder-mounted cameras, and top-of-the-line dive computers. But of course you need all this to make a found footage film. Which is what this is, ultimately, though I did not find myself muttering obscenities as I usually do at found footage films where a moment or an angle would never logically be something captured. In The Deep House limited oxygen means there’s a compressed (!) time frame so the three cameras (one per diver, one on the drone) just keep rolling.
Honestly I don’t know how this movie was filmed. It’s gorgeous and seamless. But as a scuba diver I know how long it takes to do anything correctly the first time (or quickly) underwater. Plus, without spoiling anything, there are other characters/nasties in this movie and suffice to say they are not wearing scuba gear. It’s a technical feat that deserves applause. It’s also a pretty great horror movie: good jumps, decent acting (mostly via voice and masked facial expressions, of course), harrowing environment. Like the ticking time bomb that drives so many thrillers, the steadily-decreasing oxygen supply is a natural tension-raiser for viewers nearly separate from whatever is happening on screen.
If claustrophobia or thalassophobia is your vibe or if you just want to see a new take on found footage, this is a movie for you.
Worth noting, I learned of this movie from the excellent podcast Heavy Leather Horror Show out of Salem, MA. Very much worth subscribing. I look forward to it each week. I’ll write more about this show in a future newsletter.
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The second in the trilogy that asks us all to please forget about movies 3 through 8 and oh the Rob Zombie remakes please forget those too, Halloween Kills is worth seeing if for no other reason than to find out what happened to all the kids being babysat in the first two movies. No Paul Rudd though and that’s a shame. The mass hysteria angle is admirable and timely, but I think everyone who has seen the movie agrees that the chant “Evil dies tonight!” could have effectively been uttered once. Good kills, though, and the townsfolk of Haddonfield vs. Michael penultimate scene is suitably absurd. (Also, please never forget Halloween III. It’s a wonderful movie.)
Like single-room horror? How about hundreds of single rooms stacked on top of one another connected only by dumbwaiter and a healthy dose of classist metaphor? The Platform got you. I was surprised at how much I liked this movie about what happens to inmates in a huge vertical prison who can only eat the leftovers of what’s coming to them from the next floor. Horror is often nothing more than the grotesque and that certainly describes the ravenous consumption of food that’s already been picked over 100 times. And the slow reveal of whatever happens to be waiting on the platform as it arrives never gets less suspenseful. The opposite of a jump scare. The tone of the ending is a bit at odds with the barren realism of the rest of the flick, but then that may just be what happens when the elevator finally stops.
Huge Mike Flanagan fan here. The Haunting of Hill House set the bar way up there for how good great horror can be. So my expectations were high for his latest. Midnight Mass does not disappoint. It’s maybe not as viscerally disturbing as Hill House, but for viewers recovering from any deep trauma — in the case of the series, Catholicism, alcoholism, involuntary manslaughter — it is smart, honest, and terrifying. Hamish Linklater is superb as the new priest of a small island community, while Samatha Sloyan as the prim church lady (every Catholic parish has one) ably projects a mix of self-righteousness and piety-as-a-weapon. There is much rumination on the nature of belief — which may as well be a conversation with the audience. If you were truly devout would you believe something supernatural was necessarily an angel? This series is a must-watch.
Somehow I escaped the 1980’s — the decade that made me the horror lover that I am — without seeing Carpenter’s The Thing. To atone, I started with its 1951 source The Thing From Another World, a remarkably well-paced but overlit series of set pieces strung together until the monster arrives. No shapeshifter here, exactly; the thing is more in line with its contemporary from The Black Lagoon. Worth watching, especially to see what Carpenter lifted and what he didn’t. As for the 1982 film, it’s a classic pure and simple. Maybe the strongest argument I know for the beauty of practical effects (along with American Werewolf in London). 2011’s The Thing is not a remake but a prequel for those of you wondering where that dog came from that starts the mayhem in The Thing (no, the other one). This is not a good movie. You’ll be wishing for latex dog puppets dripping slime in no time. Soft applause for trying to give some backstory to the spaceship you see at the beginning of Carpenter’s film, though. Would have liked more on that.
Growing up in Chicago I remember the 1987 hijacking of the WGN and WTTW TV broadcast feeds by someone dressed as Max Headroom. To a young nerd, this was Olympics-level hacking, especially since it was so brute force. Somebody had a microwave transmitter stronger than the ones atop the Hancock and Sears Tower! These still-unexplained events are the inspiration for Broadcast Signal Intrusion, a film that takes such interruptions of analog airborne transmissions (and lots of VHS tape nostalgia) and makes them a whole lot darker. It’s a pre-digital media detective story of sorts, low gore, sorta scary, but ultimately pretty confusing. Promising material, great lead, but underdeveloped. Now, give this script to a Japanese horror director and we may have something worth talking about.
The venerable American Horror Story franchise had some format fun this year. First their attempt to out-anthologize Shudder’s Creepshow with American Horror Stories (plural) — did not love — and recently by splitting the 10th season series into two separate and unrelated story arcs called AHS: Double Feature. The first set of episodes, called Red Tide, was meh and I’ll skip it here except to note that grown-up Macaulay Culkin did a great job as a junkie with a conscience. The second set, called Death Valley, I very much enjoyed. It’s a re-envisioning of America’s obsession with alien abduction, starting in the 50’s and flipping back and forth to a foursome abducted in the present day. Ike, JFK, Nixon, Kissinger, the moon landing, even Stanley Kubrick are woven into this story, but it’s demure Mamie Eisenhower as a scheming evil mastermind that really nailed it for me. Campy, exquisitely American horror, really.
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Radiolab recently had a multi-part podcast called Mixtape about the history and cultural ramifications of the cassette tape. I found every episode fascinating, but one, called Wandering Soul, about how the US military used cassettes to try to scare the shit out of the Viet Cong (or, more typically, presumed sympathizers) deserves inclusion in this newsletter. Desperation makes the real world scary indeed.
Speaking of recording media and horror, if you are fan of vinyl records and kickass cover art (oh and also the movie soundtracks) you gonna like Waxwork Records.
Keeping the audio theme alive — but also sorta the creepy 80’s theme too — here is a set of images of Empty dead malls with music. Don’t believe derelict shopping centers with a soundtrack can be horror? Click the Mad World one. Even the upbeat tracks are foreboding. (And if that audio post-processing is not called Empty Dead Mall Reverb then an opportunity was missed.)
Let’s end with where we started with haunted houses. This scholarly piece called “The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out” is worth a dive. Why do certain spaces make our spines tingle?
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Thanks for reading and if you are subscribed to this newsletter, thanks for that! Get in touch at jntolva@gmail.com. Next time: holiday and Christmas horror recommendations galore. ’Tis the season! 🎅🏼🔪