Wishmaster was, I thought, one of those 80’s films that I should seen by now. It was recommended to me last week, and I’ve been wracking my brains as to why it’s never really been on my radar. As it turns out, the answer is pretty simple. Centering on an ancient, evil djinn who collects souls by granting wishes that come with terrible, twisted consequences, all monkey’s paw-like, Wishmaster’s got Wes Craven’s name on it (though I don’t think he’s as involved as the movie posters would have us believe), a writer from the Hellraiser sequels, a who’s-who cast of horror gems, and, as it turns out… is actually a film from 1997.
This explains everything about why I never saw it. I was a few years out of high school by that time, and trying to figure out what to do with my life, and I don’t think I was doing much in the way of reading or movie-watching. I was doing a lot of anxious avoidance of everything, including and especially the things I loved–like horror. I had just seen Scream the year previously and that’s really the only film I recall watching during that time period. Last night while watching Wishmaster and trying to figure out the year it was made by observing the clothing and hairstyles and such (instead of the easier thing to do, looking it up on IMDB) I began comparing it to Scream for some reason, and came away with the impression that Scream just felt much more contemporary to me, whereas Wishmaster really did seem like an 80s relic. Imagine my surprise when I looked it up and realized that Wishmaster was actually released a year later than Scream!
Well, considering that Wishmaster had a bunch of ridiculously gory practical effects–some of them pretty great, actually, like the skeleton busting out of someone’s skin in the film’s opening–and Scream was a hip update of the slasher genre, I guess in comparison, Wishmaster would seem a bit retro?
There was a lot to love about this film! It begins with a Persian sorcerer trapping the malevolent djinn in a jewel, and then we fast forward to the present day, or rather, 1997. Some sort of relic is being delivered to a collector (Robert Englund!) and in a careless accident, a crane drops the box containing it, and Englund’s assistant (Ted Raimi!) is squashed and killed. A glowing red jewel is revealed in the broken statue and a construction worker pockets it and sells it to a pawnbroker, who then takes it to an auction house. This is how it ends up in the hands of Alex, who in examining the stone–which she annoyingly keeps referring to as an “opal”, but come on, it’s bright red!–somehow activates the djinn.
In the beginning, the narrator (Angus Scrimm!) explains that “God breathed life into the universe…the light gave birth to Angels…the earth gave birth to man…the fire gave birth to the djinn, creatures condemned to dwell in the void between the worlds.” And that the person who wakes a djinn will receive three wishes, but the third wish will free legions of djinn on Earth. So these are the stakes here, but no one’s ever going to follow a trail of carnage and immediately think “Ah, methinks this is the work of a djinn!” so I think it’s forgivable that it takes Alex a while to figure out what’s going on.
The djinn is played by a deliciously magnetic Andrew Divoff to gravelly-voiced devilish perfection…I don’t know that I know this actor from anything else but MAN he was creepy in this. There is a kooky, sassy professor of folklore (you can tell she’s kooky and sassy because of the statement necklaces) who is a hoot, and oh yeah–Tony Todd shows up as a doomed doorman, Reggie Bannister is a nasty pharmacist who meets a nasty end, Tom Savini plays a bit part and there’s even the husband of someone I know through Instagram who has a tiny part in this film!
And while the dialogue was just whatever, there were a few instances when the professor was talking about the lore and history of the djinn, for example, or when the djinn himself was describing the destruction and chaos he going to delight in bringing forth–I thought those parts were delightfully dark and poetic and well-written. This is coming from someone who likes a bit of purple prose, so take that with a grain of salt, I guess.
Do I want to watch the probably very silly and bad sequels? I think that I do!
When I polled my Facebook friends the other day for some fun movie ideas, it was with the caveat that Renfield was very much already on my radar–I just couldn’t watch it that particular night because it was already promised viewing. But I finally got around to it last night when we watched it with Ývan’s brother, after his birthday dinner (it was the brother’s birthday, not Ývan’s–I would never marry a Scorpio!)
I have no notes. It was everything I ever wanted in a silly comedy about Dracula’s beleaguered familiar recognizing his dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship with the infamous monster, and realizing he wants something more for himself. Sure, it got a little sidetracked with the taking down of a mob familiar and its buddy-cop shenanigans, but listen–I think Awkwafina is a goddess, and if she’s getting paid to show up in a movie and play a cop in a movie where cops are a completely dumb and useless idea, whatever! I’ll take it! Anyhow, I don’t have a critical eye or incredibly high standards when it comes to cinema (Was it pretty? Did it make me laugh? Those are the two important boxes to tick) so I thought Renfield was a bloody hoot.
Book cover art by James Jirat Patradoon for ‘The Dead Take The A Train’ by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey
Despite the fact that my reading has been on the back burner this month, I did manage to finish a few things in the almost-final-days of October…
The Dead Take A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey I’d found the previous title from Cassandra Khaw that I’d read (Nothing But Blackened Teeth) a bit off-putting. In that story, five friends convene to have some pre-wedding adventures at a purported haunted castle– but I have never in my years of reading been subjected to a group of friends who hated each other more. The Dead Take A Train, for all its bombastic horror and gore, ruthless demons and repulsive gods…is actually a tale of love and friendship? I liked that. I found the writing lush and disgusting and completely over the top –which is very much my thing!– and the story itself, that of self-destructive demon hunter/supernatural-squasher Julie attempting to prevent a cosmic-horror-end-of-the-world scenario and save her friends in the middle of New York’s gritty, magical underbelly–was an absolute hoot. It reminded me a bit of the post-apocalyptic demon-punk romp of Simon Drax’s A Very Fast Descent Into Hell!
The Keeper by Tananarive Due When it comes to a Tananarive Due story, I know I’m always in for a treat that’s going to tug at my heartstrings before straight up ripping my heart out of my chest –and The Keeper with its proliferation of childhood fears and trauma does just that. Aisha’s parents are killed in a car crash and shortly after moving in with her elderly grandmother, the ailing woman’s health takes a rapid decline. Before dying, she calls forth a dark spirit to protect her granddaughter…or is this entity actually an ancient curse?
Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror by Jordan Peele Exploring “not only the terror of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation,” this was an outstanding collection wherein almost every story was so good that I wish it could have been expanded on for a full-novel experience. What I find interesting in these gatherings of tales across cultures, is seeing what it is that scares me (the end-of-the-world ones are particularly freaky) as opposed to something that while perhaps fascinating, doesn’t seem all that frightening–because it comes from a part of the world so wholly different from what I know. Even as I am writing those words, I realize that is some privileged white lady shit. I am not unaware. Three exceptionally memorable ones in that sort of personally-scary-for-me apocalyptic vein are Invasion of the Baby Snatchers, which is as outlandish and otherworldly as you might imagine, and both “Flicker” and “Pressure,” which begin as mundane little tales but are –absolutely– not.
Godzilla: The Half-Century War by James Stokoe Ývan surprised me with a copy of this Godzilla story about a soldier who spends the entirety of his career tangled in kaiju conflict, up to and including the very last seconds of his life. Bold, exciting, and unexpectedly poignant, I sped through this excellent graphic novel in an afternoon.
Where Monsters Lie by Kyle Starks and Piotr Kowalski (Illustrator) If you’ve ever wondered where slashers shack up between murder sprees, well, you probably would not have envisioned them as a coterie of killers relaxing in a gated community–complete with an HOA and monthly meetings. This short, vicious collection of issues 1-4 comprises those dysfunctional group dynamics, the story of a kid who can’t seem to escape them despite his best attempts, and the agent that’s been training to hunt them since the slaughter of his own family when he was a child. Be forewarned–this experience really does put the “graphic” in graphic novel, but it was SO much good(bad/awful/murderous) fun!
As you might surmise from the title, Slotherhouse is about a killer sloth on the loose in a sorority house. You don’t need to know anything more than that. Except yes, the featured image from this post is that of a sloth driving a car. She uses GPS, too!
Yesterday I implored my friends on social media to help me pick a film, which is how Slotherhouse ended up on the docket. I was in desperate need of something FUN. I have noped out of so many viewings this October, either because of the squick factor (ie Day 20’s Dead Ringers) or because they triggered massive anxiety (ie Day 25’s Speak No Evil.) Life is too short to watch things that make you feel miserable!
I asked them “What is the most fun you’ve had watching a horror movie, and what was it? It doesn’t have to be funny or satire or a parody (for example, I think Hellraiser is fun!) but whenever you watch it you’re just super jazzed, thinking, now THIS is why I’m a horror fan!”
You can read all of the resulting answers here, just in case you need something fun as a palate cleanser before the month is out! I also asked friends over on threads the same question, and you can find those responses here.
“Uncomfortable” is a word I throw around a lot. I have a very, very low tolerance when it comes to uncomfortable, awkward, or embarrassing situations.
Speak No Evil is relentlessly, brutally uncomfortable. I think if I had read the synopsis or watched the trailer beforehand, I probably would have given this one a pass. It was recommended to me later in the day yesterday, and trusting the horror-guru implicitly, I went for it.
…and then noped out at the 45-minute mark.
Two families on vacation in Tuscany – one Danish, one Dutch – meet and become friendly. Months later, the outgoing Dutch family invites the more conservative Danes to spend a weekend at their cabin. However, it doesn’t take long before things become tense and awkward as either cultural misunderstandings or the miscommunications of people who don’t know each other very well become egregiously apparent. Too well-mannered to confront their hosts’ increasingly erratic and rude behavior, the Danes politely stick it out, until something so unsettling happens that they actually sneak out in the wee hours of the morning while their bizarre hosts are asleep.
As we were only a third of the way through the film, I knew this was too good to be true. And of course, I was right! They hadn’t driven very far before their daughter starts to panic and cry, realizing she’d left her stuffed rabbit toy behind. You can see the anxiety in her father’s eyes as he is debating their options and then, sickeningly, he turns the car around.
At that point, I shouted NOPE! Jumped out of my chair so fast that it tipped over, and ran out of the room. My heart was racing and I was shaking so hard I imagined I could taste the bitter, metallic adrenaline in my mouth. Even though I didn’t KNOW-know where this was headed, I had a solid enough idea that it was ratcheting up to something awful, and I just couldn’t subject myself to the plight of a family who was going to get themselves killed because their accommodating natures overrode their sense of self-preservation.
Honestly, it felt too relatable. Up to the point I stopped watching, nothing bad had even happened, really, it was all so innocuous. But see, that’s where I, too, have been conditioned to be obliging and understanding! Because even as I am watching and thinking “well making your guests pay for a meal you had promised to treat them to isn’t exactly a crime” I know in my gut, it’s really tacky! And while practically forcing your vegetarian guest to sample a bite of your roast pork isn’t evil, it’s outrageously disrespectful. I would certainly never do that to anyone. I know better. That’s the thing. Even if on some level it doesn’t seem all that bad, the heart of who I am, it KNOWS. But would I trust what I know to be true enough to leave that situation? I don’t know!
This October I’m finding more than a few instances where I’ve had enough and I am quick to call it. I know I say this all the time lately, but I don’t know how much time I have left on this earth and I don’t want to spend it making myself miserable, even if the thing I’m experiencing or engaging with is a purported masterpiece. That’s fine. I gave it a shot, and it wasn’t for me. Afterward, I read the entire synopsis on Wikipedia, and now, knowing what I know …I think (??) I might have been able to watch it.
Not knowing where things were heading was factoring into my anxiety, so being armed with the plot–spoilers and all–might have helped. Would I have enjoyed seeing it through? I most assuredly would not have. All in all, it reminded me of Funny Games (I think many reviewers felt the same) and if you did not love that one, you probably won’t want to watch Speak No Evil.
Instead, I watched more Deadloch. I cannot stress this enough. If you are too freaked out by what you are watching this spooky season, you need to take a little break and tune into this show!
–A. I appreciate this recommendation and any time you want to share suggestions with me! Speak No Evil wasn’t my cuppa but I love that you shared it and my ears are always open for your recommendations. Also when I went to look it up, I momentarily forgot the title and almost started the 2006 See No Evil with KANE, ha!
Last October I watched X, and I promised myself that this year I would watch the prequel, Pearl (which I was able to get through my library via Kanopy, hurrah!) Pearl is the unhinged, baby-faced origin story of the horny, murderous old gal in X. And much like X, Pearl made me very, very uncomfortable
Pearl is special. She wants something more than her life on her parent’s farm, she wants something better than her mother’s dreary life and father’s invalid existence, she wants to get out of her small town and be a star. She’s married Howard, a neighbor from a nice family, with the hopes that he’ll be her ticket out of this place, but Pearl’s plans are thwarted in that regard because he actually wants to live on the farm. None of that matters anyway, because he’s been shipped overseas and Pearl is all alone in her miserable longing and loneliness. And, as it turns out, her escalating craziness. As the disappointments pile up for Pearl, she begins giving into her violent impulses in increasingly extravagant and bloody ways.
In some ways, Pearl seems awfully naive and appears to be untethered from reality. But you also get the impression that she might have a canny sense about people and can see through their bullshit–even her own, as evidenced by a heartbreaking monologue near the end of the film where she admits she is not unaware that people are frightened of her, that she’s a bit scared herself of how much she enjoyed hurting people and things. How she just wants to be loved, and how she may have ruined the future of her marriage with a good man. A good man who at the end of the film, comes home to be greeted by Pearl’s carnage.
So, why did Pearl make me so uncomfortable? As someone who could be dying in the street, bleeding out all over the place–I wouldn’t make a peep about it or cry for help, for fear of the embarrassment of it all. Pearl’s a character who runs around French-kissing scarecrows, hollering her feelings at some guy she barely even knows, she isn’t fearful or the least bit self-conscious about getting up on stage and doing a silly little dance in front of strangers and also doesn’t have the least bit of a problem about having a total screaming meltdown in front of them, when they don’t pick her for the part. Afterward, she wails and sobs like a freaking banshee on the church steps (ostensibly everyone is still inside and can hear her carrying on) and that’s just, like…Pearl. No concept that it’s weird and awkward and making everyone uncomfortable. Every particle of my being shudders at all of this.
Pearl reminds me a bit of the drama kids in high school who would be loud and obnoxious and belt out songs during lunchtime, and they’d be totally oblivious to the spectacle they were creating (or maybe they didn’t care, I guess?) and I would be thinking “OMG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT US.”
I know, that’s very much a Sarah-problem. My super repressed hangups and such. That’s fair. And hey, you might have known those kids. You might have BEEN those kids! I’m sorry for sounding intolerant. But yeah…Sarah doesn’t like being made uncomfortable, and Pearl was massive unease and discomfort on steroids, delivered at the pointy end of a pitchfork.
One reviewer summed Pearl up as “heartbreaking in the most abject way possible” and wow. Yes. Exactly.
Due to the rules I myself am enforcing, I am contractually obligated to tell you that I watched Amazon’s Totally Killermovie, wherein our lady brat of perpetual eye-rolls Sally Draper travels back in time to prevent a returned killer from murdering her mom in the present. This movie neither commits to being scary nor being funny. I think the only fun I had with it was watching how things being changed in the past began subtly, or otherwise, altering things in the present. But I feel like they could have leaned even further into that, too! SIGH. It was fine. Whatever.
You guys. I have been waiting on this Tomie-inspired fragrance ever since Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab teased its creation way back sometime last year. And much like the feelings provoked by the malevolent, regenerative entity herself, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since that time.
I’ve mentioned my great love for horror manga artist Junji Ito’s creations many times on this blog; just the other day I included one of the Tomie movies (there are like nine of them at this point) in my 31 Days of Horror blogs. But if you’re unfamiliar, how to describe Tomie? I feel like a monster myself (and a horrible feminist) when I try to talk about her. Tomie is an enthralling young woman whose beauty drives people mad in different ways–women want to either be her or, or are insanely jealous of her, and men become obsessed with her to the extent that they end up chopping her up and killing her–and she returns eternally to torment all of them.
What is Tomie? A succubus? A mutation? To me, at least, it’s never really clear. She’s an irredeemable anti-hero who’s an absolute guilty pleasure girl-power fantasy and she brings to mind the Margaret Atwood quote, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
..and all this misogynistic violence and exploitative gendered body horror and self-flagellation on my part for even reading it at all stems from the artist’s boyhood memory of a classmate dying. In an interview, Juni Ito shared that a boy in his junior high died in a traffic accident.
He observed, “It just felt so odd to me that a classmate who was so full of life should suddenly disappear from the world, and I had a strange feeling that he would show up again innocently.” He goes on to reveal that’s how he came up with the idea of a girl who is supposed to have died but then just shows up as if nothing had happened.
In Wikipedia, it says that he was inspired by the phenomenon of lizard tail regeneration. I suppose it could be both, why not!
Anyway! Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has taken all of our Tomie angst and terror and created a “seductive and deceptively delicate blend of rose-tinted white sandalwood, ethereal white amber, voluptuous almond blossom, coeur de jasmin, and a gasp of bourbon vanilla.”
When I first wore it, it seemed a simple confectionary musk. I became unnerved and overwhelmed when I thought for a second there that it was beginning to remind me of something, a sort of candied heliotrope feather boa of a perfume that when I first smelled it in 2020 I became convinced that it was a monstrously annoying YouTube celebrity’s signature scent. (She was revoltingly pink and OKAY YES I was obsessively watching her even though I hated her and found her vile and this all makes sense to me even if I can’t explain it.) I don’t want to say who because I don’t want to be a mean girl, and I also hate comparing one perfume to another when I am reviewing things, but my only point here is, that I thought I smelled this perfume for a brief second* but when I obsessively began sniffing my wrist trying to pinpoint it, the momentary phantom was already gone. There is actually no comparing these two scents at all, but the thing is, from then on, I never stopped obsessively sniffing.
*my point, which I am having the devil of a time trying to articulate is that BPAL, in those opening notes, nailed that sort of attractive/repellent quality that this specific perfume requires; a flash of something revolting just to remind you who you’re dealing with, but then you’re immediately and utterly subsumed by how beautiful it is and you’ve forgotten that you were briefly but thoroughly appalled. It’s hard to write a sentence with the words “revolting” or appalling” when it comes to your favorite perfumer, but it feels so marvelously intentional and incredibly executed here, I can’t not talk about it!
Tomie crawls beneath your skin, a slithery jasmine-amber-flecked marzipan cotton candy ghost musk of a scent, but not a fresh, hot carnival cone of the stuff–rather, the soft, sticky filaments of floss caught in your uniquely self-scented hair at the end of the night. And maybe a bewitched and bothered someone is bizarrely compelled to snip a few of those sweet, tangled tendrils while you’re sleeping because they’re an absolute psychopath, and maybe when you wake up in the morning the scissors are gripped in your own hands, the sultry tresses are tucked into your own little etched sandalwood box, and maybe, perhaps, the psychopath is you. Utterly obsessed with yourself.
BPAL’s Tomie is both quietly haunting and all-consuming, the ghost of something you’re desperate to possess, but which is fully possessing you even as it slips through your fingers and disappears.
This is exactly it. This is Tomie. They got her perfectly right.
Good lord. There is no one, NO ONE who writes Southern small-town nastiness like Michael McDowell. McDowell was a novelist and screenwriter whom you may or may not have heard of depending on how much into horror you are. You may have read The Elementals (that’s the last book I read that kept me up until 4 o’clock in the morning!) or Gilded Needles or his Blackwater series. Or if those don’t ring a bell, you may be familiar with the screenplay he wrote for a little movie called Beetlejuice. He was in the midst of writing the screenplay for Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas when he died in 1999. Horror fans, I know you already know this, but this is for the people who are hearing it for the first time. Oh yeah, McDowell, also wrote the novelization of Clue!
From the first 30 or so pages, you would not think this book will go as hard as it does. Absolutely dialogue-free and exquisitely methodical in its descriptiveness, it sets the tone and the atmosphere in the town of Pine Cone, Alabama, a town “proud of its population of two thousand, and it might well be since there is nothing to keep them there except stubborn civic pride, overwhelming inertia, or a perverse moral self-discipline bordering on masochism.”
But, our narrative gleefully divulges, ” it can also be said that there is a great vitality in the mean-spiritedness of the town’s inhabitants. Sometimes they are creatively cruel to one another, and there were seasons in which Pine Cone was an exciting place to live–if you were a spectator and not a victim.”
The events of The Amulet most assuredly take place in such a season.
Sarah Howell finds herself trapped in a nightmare. Her husband, Dean, had a rifle blow up in his face during a training exercise before he shipped out to Vietnam. He’s been horribly disfigured (the extent of which we never even find out, he’s swaddled in bandages like a mummy through the entirety of the book) and more or less left a living corpse. Sarah is forced to care for him, while also enduring the scorn of her hateful mother-in-law, Jo. Jo is truly one of the most awful fictional characters you will ever encounter.
Dean’s friend Larry pays a visit, hoping that he is doing the right thing by stopping in, but is feeling terribly guilty and uncomfortable about being there. Larry was unable to secure a job for Dean at the rifle factory in town, which led to Dean ending up in the army. Jo has a laundry list of grievances about everything in general, but she especially blames the town for her son’s circumstances, and Larry in particular. Jo sends him away with an unusual amulet to take home as a gift for his wife Rachel.
That night Larry and Rachel’s house burns down, with them and their three children inside.
The amulet inexplicably passes from one hand to the next, wreaking havoc and leaving extraordinary carnage in its wake. Not even a quarter of the way through the book, the undertaker is running out of coffins! And no one is safe–while it may have started with someone linked to Dean’s accident, it doesn’t limit itself to locals with those sorts of ties…a poor woman passing through town with her husband gets her throat torn out by her own hogs when the amulet makes its way into her possession.
Sarah begins seeing a connection in the string of bizarre deaths and becomes convinced that somehow, the trinket is involved. As the body count rises, Sarah realizes that she must somehow stop the amulet before it’s too late. But how can she defeat an evil she can’t understand or even hands on–especially when no one believes her?
I literally exclaimed OOOOOOF aloud when I finished this book. GOOD LORD.
Hello, friends! The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook Of All That Is Unreal has been out in the world for a little over two months now! Let’s mark the occasion with a giveaway!
Let’s also gaze upon these glorious glamour shots that Alyssa Thorne created in celebration of the book! A fantastical floral woodland scene wherein one may stumble upon a strange tome, brimming with magical, wondrous art and imagery, offered up in the arms of a bewitched tree.
Here is a lovely page, frilled by a fairy wing breeze, featuring the art of dear Brett Manning, whose captivating creatures fiddle, strum, and tootle through the twilight!
If you would like to win a signed copy of The Art of Fantasy, please follow this link and do what it says to do!
One winner –US ONLY– will be chosen and contacted on Friday, October 27
