Plague of Strength

This was originally intended as a distraction from something I’d been working on over the last few months, then became a lead-in to the East Coast’s premier horror movie convention, Monster Mania, which was supposed to occur this week. In addition to not being able to grab a Danny Trejo Cerveza for Tara to have Danny Trejo sign while she got pics with him, we didn’t get to see any of the people we’d intended to interview, or hang out with our peeps. I had planned to buy the beer off my boy Anthony Gutter at the Gutterchrist Productions booth, but the event’s cancellation blew up me throwing him loot and interviewing Trejo and (I was hoping) Kane Hodder about their training. We cannot, however, because COVID is a motherfucker.

That shit aside, we could all stand to have a decent distraction while life’s on plague pause, and I can think of no better way to distract oneself from the tumult of of the 2020 flu season than thoughts of an alien menace far scarier than a head cold. If that seems odd, I think it just provides a bit of perspective- while a shitload of people think the end times are here, this is barely even a minor blip on the world stage, which is exactly the point of cosmic horror. For instance, this week we discovered there are bubbles of nothing voraciously eating spacetime and that a blazar (which is the dopest name ever given to anything) that weighs as much as a billion suns is pointed directly at us and can blast a hole through galaxies. To help demonstrate exactly how small and ultimately inconsequential we all are, I’ve compiled some seriously rad cosmic horror in film that bear mentioning because the genre is largely overlooked and because watching shit like Outbreak is just going to stress you the fuck out, especially when we have all of space to worry about.

Lovecraftian horror, which is also called cosmic horror, encompasses the entire William Hope Hodgson and Lovecraftian universes, which have been merged pretty seamlessly and for some includes Sherlock Holmes as well (Hodgson had an occult version of Holmes in his universe). It’s characterized by antiquarian speech (Lovecraft was basically a very well-read incel who irritated everyone who knew him), the fragility of the human psyche, and the unknowable massiveness of the universe, and humanity’s ultimate insignificance. By the time it hits film however, it’s generally just a bunch of tentacles and slime and eyeballs everywhere, overlaid with unraveling sanity and a lot of pink and purple lights.

This is by no means intended to be a comprehensive list- I know people love The Void, for instance, which I’ve never been interested enough to sit all the way through; I personally love The Heretics, a doomsday cult film I’m sure I’ve written about before. that qualifies as cosmic horror; and there are plenty of people out there who love From Beyond, although I think it’s unwatchable trash- all of this shit is subjective, and I’m not claiming to be an authority on cosmic horror or film.

Call Girl of Cthulu (2014)

What do you get when you take an alt-model who’s roommates with a virginal nerd who’s been dating a prostitute, but that prostitute’s been chosen as the bride of Cthulu, and she starts to transform into a succubus full of tentacles who lives on nothing but throbbing cock and human flesh? A badass indie horror flick set to a solid punk soundtrack and featuring enough camp and gore to entertain even the most sober motherfucker you know. I could say that t’s about as DIY and punk rock as a movie could be, and displays enough knowledge of the mythos to be give the occasional “in the know” wink without being obsessed by technicalities, but in the end, it’s punk rock, titties, gore, and comedy. You’re doing yourself a disservice by not watching this.

As one silver-tongued reviewer stated,

“Don’t let the apologetic paragraph above lead you into believing “Call Girl of Cthulhu” is subtly sophisticated, though.  This is a movie featuring death by dildo through the throat, acidic urine melting facial flesh on a call girl client expecting a golden shower, boobs turning into snarling slug creatures, and penises mutating into similarly vicious alien beasts.  Such a strange brew is an acquired taste palatable only for those who measure expectations according to content, checkbook, and an often-juvenile brand of humor that won’t hit every funny bone” (Sedensky).

After writing that last bit, I checked and discovered the fucking thing isn’t available to watch legally anywhere, but you can stream it here for free.

Black Site (2019)

One of the cooler gimmicks in low-budget films these days is to make the film a throwback to the VHS era, and this is one of those flicks. Set in what appears to be the early 90s, Black Site is set in a world in which the government has systematically eliminated threats from Cthulu’s dimension and banished them there. In a facility that is being decommissioned, one of the few remaining Old Ones is set to be banished. Before that can happen, cultists who are attempting to restore the Old Ones raid the facility. Hijinks ensue, cheesy one-liners abound, and many faces are karate’ed- even down to the 90s-era fight choreography, this thing was a throwback to the days of JCVD and Seagal.

It’s on Amazon Prime for free, so there’s really no reason not to watch this flick.

Color Out of Space (2020)

Color Out of Space is one film in a trilogy of Lovecraftian horror to be made by the director, Richard Stanley, who is best known as the eccentric filmmaker behind Hardware and the ill-fated Island of Doctor Moreau. He’s a massive Lovecraft fan who’s recently fallen out of love with the neopaganism movements sweeping the world, claiming (not incorrectly) that the movement is just a “creeping form of fascism,” and is clearly hellbent on making his movie, rather than the studio’s movie, all of which is apparent in every second of Color’s screen time.

Color Out of Space is an updated version of Lovecraft’s original by the same name (though true to his Anglophilic antiquarianism, Lovecraft used the British spelling of “colour”). In it, a family moves to the country after the matriarch’s double mastectomy, whereupon a meteorite lands on their property, infusing shit with a weird color and causing water to shimmer with an oily sheen. Despite warnings to avoid the water by a hydrologist, the family remains even as the wildlife and their alpacas begin to mutate. The family goes insane as they transform into tentacle and slime-filled monsters, Nic Cage reprises his pants-shittingly crazy Mandy role, and buckets of gore fly around. Though Lovecraft isn’t gory by nature, anything starring Nic Cage damn sure is, and this movie does not dissapoint on the practical effects.

If for no other reason, you should see this flick because in addition to being Stanley’s first hit since the 90s, it sets up The Dunwich Horror adaptation he plans to release by 2022 that will probably take place seven years after the events of Color, or a future version of the Lovecraftian city of Arkham. That will set up a third film that is apparently going to see the Old Ones returning to Earth for an all-out war, which sounds to me like a hypercolor, hard-R Pacific Rim with more tentacles, titties, and gore, which would be fucking glorious.

Color Out of Space is out on all of the major VOD sites, and it’s worth paying to see.

Event Horizon (1997)

If you’ve not seen Event Horizon, it’s certain you must’ve heard of this late-90s mindfuck. Ostensibly a space mystery, the mystery turns decidedly Lovecraftian (or at least 40k-esque) when they find that a ship designed to bend space-time to instantly move incomprehensible distances actually travels through a chaos dimension to do so. That blood-soaked madness has infected the ship, and it threatens to merge the chaos dimension with our reality. Morphius plays a young ship captain battling the dude from epic B-movie Body Parts (as it turns out, it just looks like the same guy thirty years later- they’re two different guys) as the rapidly more insane ship’s designer to prevent the release of the combined forces of Chaos and the Cenobites (and Hellraiser could ostensibly be construed as cosmic horror at some point) upon our universe.

Though the nastiest bits of Event Horizon ended up getting destroyed before the film’s producer could make a Director’s Cut, it left me with a lingering sense of unease for days after I first saw it. It’s gory only in a couple of spots, but the implied gnarliness of the gory scenes is enough to seriously ramp up the squick factor. And for those of you who are huge Lovecraft fans and dispute the inclusion of this flick, I’ll counter that the themes are identical to Lovecraft’s, and Lovecraftian science fiction almost invariably seems to be a riff on the general theme of Event Horizon. For anyone who’s interested, there’s a good compendium of Lovecraftian scifi horror in Space Eldrich, which is a cheap read on Kindle.

If you just want to check the movie out while you’re sitting at home, it’s on Netflix at the moment.

The Thing (1982 & 2011)

Again, this film isn’t specifically Lovecraftian in terms of mythos, but the themes and the tentacles place it squarely within cosmic horror. Additionally, it is a third of a trilogy of John Carpenter films that are apocalyptic cosmic horror that includes a JW Campbell novella that was probably influenced by Lovecraft’s In the Mouth of Madness and a film by that title more loosely based on the original that was The Thing and the novel that inspired it, Who Goes There?

The Thing is about a group of researchers in the Arctic who uncover a frozen alien craft. In doing so, they unwittingly thaw out the alien itself, which is a shape-shifting monstrosity consisting of little more than tentacles, fangs, and slime.As it takes over oneafter another of the hyper-isolated crewmen, suspicion and general insanity combine with good, old-fashioned American bloodthirstiness to ensure that if humanity does have an alien encounter, it’ll end in the brutal slaughter of those interstellar interlopers.

It’s free on Hulu and for rent all over the place otherwise.

The Endless (2017)

Though it lacks tentacles, slime, and many of the other aspects one typically expects in cosmic horror, once you finish this flick, you will agree with my assessment. It’s about two guys who escaped a UFO death cult as kids and return as adults, only to find that they were both correct to leave and horribly wrong about everything they previously thought the cult was about. It’s not quite the Old Gods, but the movie does open with a Lovecraft quote, and their previous film Spring (free on Tubi) was decidedly Lovecraftian romantic body horror.

This one is a slow burn, but it’s definitely worth the wait. Check it out on Netflix.

Monkey-Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

This book is apparently a sort of modern American classic, though I happened upon it in what I think was yet another foiled attempt at purchasing A Confederacy of Dunces (I generally remember that the book is just crap people claim to have read if they want to seem intelligent just before completing the purchase). This thing languished on my bookshelf, forgotten as Brandon Routh’s Superman film, for four years until I actually cracked the thing, and I was immediately pissed at myself for not having read this sooner.

If you were to cross Fight Club with Leaving Las Vegas, with a bit of a punch-up from Douglas Adams, you’d get The Monkey-Wrench Gang. A novel about using small-scale ecoterrorism to combat the pervasive inroads of Western commercialism and visual pollution, it served as a sort of novelized version of how one would go about committing ecoterrorism, with step-by-step instructions. Just as Patriots was equal parts Bible Study, survivalist manual, and post-apocalyptic gun-nut masturbatory fantasy, The Monkey-Wrench Gang is an unholy combination of the Anarchist’s Cookbook and Fight Club designed for ecologically-minded anarcho-syndicalists, green anarchists, and anyone who would have enjoyed getting blazed and hammered with Patrick Henry, Betty White, Garibaldi, or Thomas Paine.

And in case you’re interested in grabbing a novelized survivalist manual, Patriots was excellent in spite of my obvious disagreements with the religious aspects of it. A little known but awesome book in that vein is The Borrowed World, which I’ve read a number of times and enjoyed each time. Forrest Griffin had a survivalist book ghost written for him at some point (Be Ready When the Shit Goes Down), but I didn’t find it all that edifying. I also own the Disaster Diaries by Sam Sheridan and cannot recall a single detail about it, so that might be one you can pass on as well.

Though I don’t really consider myself a survivalist, if any of you care my library consists of:

The SAS Survival Handbook. Pretty self explanatory. Door kickers teaching you how to party in the wilderness? I’m in.

The Disaster Diaries by Sam Sheridan. I guess I’ll look over again since I can’t do much else, because the author, Sam Sheridan, is a Harvard-educated UFC fighter with a quality writing style.

the OG Boy Scout Handbook. Dates to 1911 and gives you all of the basics on bushcraft in addition to a ton of primers on the flora and fauna you might encounter. Whereas the Brit who established the Scouts was a bit of a dipshit when it came to palling around with fascists, the founder of the Boy Scouts of America was a seriously cool Canadian dude of whom the Brit was a big fan. Ernest Thompson Seton

Prepper’s Long-Term Survival Guide: Food, Shelter, Security, Off-the-Grid Power and More Life-Saving Strategies for Self-Sufficient Living by Jim Cobb. Long fucking title, but it explains why I own it.

Prepare for Anything by Tim MacWelch. This thing gives you easy-to-follow instructions for doing all sorts of useful shit, like making a solar still. The author is the survival writer for a couple of major magazines and seemed like a potentially useful book. He’s got another on bushcraft that looks rad, but I’ve yet to snag it.

The Borrowed World by Franklin Horton. Horton’s protagonist is a self-professed hillbilly who is “just trying to get home to his wife” in the midst of a global meltdown. If you can get past the pretentiousness of the man’s position, his book is a very quick hot-to and what-to for what to do when, as the preppers love to screech with spittle flying from their lips, “THE SHIT HITS THE FAN!” Again, the moralistic fantasies the right has about “hardy, rugged, individualist” red hatters are preposterous, but the info contained therein is useful and the writing is solid.

That said, we could all stand to watch The Platform, which is currently streaming on Netflix. It’s set in a near-future Spain, I believe, in which there is a place called the Pit. It’s a jail at least 131 stories high, in which two inmates live on each floor. The center is occupied by a platform that passes downward from Floor 0, where it contains enough food for every person in the facility, to the bottom floor.

The concept is that if they all worked together and ate only their share, they would all have plenty to eat. If they take what they want or “deserve,” starvation ensues. People being shit, you can imagine the Lord of the Flies-style insanity that ensues, and it is carefully packaged in a social commentary that explains everything from the current hoarders to the social democrats to the right wingers to the Boomers destroying everything so no one else can have shit.

It’s very similar in parts to the short film Q is to Questionnaire in ABCs of Death 2, which is an awesome anthology film that was released a few years back. There’s callbacks to that, Cube, High Rise, and half a dozen other literary works that speak to the filmmakers’ serious interest in near-future dystopias and the current state of our civilization, which again I think is in no danger of collapse. As such, it gives some interesting food for thought, no matter your political or religious affiliations.

And there you have my recommendations for shit at present. At some point I will do a music article, since I get asked about those most frequently, but I’ll likely be heading back into fight sports because that seems to be my favorite topic of late and I’ve got some really phenomenal info on some Victorian-era fighters. Frankly, my attention has been all over the place recently, so the writing could go any of a number of ways, but fight sports look like it, along with some recipe articles as Tara and I get creative on the cheap.

By the way, if you’re awaiting a print book, check your email on Wednesday, as there is an update on that. Amazon halted all of their print-to-order services to ship essential items, so the print copies of everything are in limbo until they restart. They’re saying on or before the 5th, but as everything changes on a daily basis, it really depends on people keeping their fucking shit together so we can all get back to the business of living. In the meantime, we’re gonna send the people awaiting their stuff some free shit in an effort to tide them over, since this is a fucking disaster for everyone.

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