code red

Please read Jerome Murphy's startling / powerful poem "Code Red" over at The Awl.

Peace.

horror month!

My reviews:

Bay of Blood
Body Snatchers
Curse of Chucky
House of Frankenstein
The Mummy's Hand
Not of This Earth (1988)

My "Underrated" Horror Picks on Rupert Pupkin Speaks

Jerome Murphy's Selection of Retro Childhood Cover Art

Jerome Murphy's Teen Horror Cover Deathmatch between R.L. Stine & Christopher Pike

Justin Lockwood's List of Great Performances in Horror

Justin Lockwood's Review of Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem

Karen G.'s Small Screen Horror Gems

Nick Tassone's Minimal Art Stephen King Alternative Poster

teen thriller cover deathmatch: r.l. stine versus christopher pike by jerome murphy

In our last lurch down memory lane, we revisited some under-appreciated chiller classics for kids. But it’s time to raise the wooden stakes for a clash of real titans.




Christopher Pike was the teen Stephen King, while R.L. Stine was the teen Dean Koontz. But when weighing these two teen titans against one another, we’ve got to set aside all literary merit in consideration of what matters most. Their covers.

Category 1: Shock Jocks

Monster vs. High Tide

A successful teen thriller cover requires that damsels clinging sexily to specimens of young manhood must do so in the most sensuality-punishing manner possible. A sense of campy, B-movie menace pervades Pike’s cover, while the message of Stine’s seems to be that gentlemen prefer blondes. Very strongly.

Winner: Pike

Category 2: Ominous Exteriors

Weekend vs. The Surprise Party

Consider whether you’d rather have that weekend, or that surprise party. Weekend’s suggestive cover is in much better taste, but its caption raises the question: why not work on your tan and staying alive at the same time? Stine’s bolder use of color and atmosphere takes the win.



Winner: Stine

Category 3: Damsels in Distress

Die Softly vs. Silent Night

Die Softly’s a classic, trashy cover with the meta frame device of a camera lens. Whereas Stine’s Silent Night looks slightly un-silent.


Winner: Pike

Category 4: Screeching Tires

Road to Nowhere vs. The Dare

Tough call. The Dare invites suspenseful speculation. But Road to Nowhere gains points with an empowered woman in the driver’s seat, cruising along with her fuzzy dice despite a skeletal passenger violating her personal space. Keepin’ it calm, because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.


Winner: Pike

Category 5: Comic Relief

The Eternal Enemy vs. Final Grade

Will Lily get an A in murder? I think so! Meanwhile, Eternal Enemy will probably pull through with a B+. Stine’s cover takes the win with an inspired use of neon title text, along with its intriguing fashion choices.


Winner: Stine

Bonus Round: Couples Therapy

Whisper of Death vs. Haunted

Whisper of Death suggests we might actually work things out, by bonding against a common antagonist. So it’s actually a whisper of hope. But on second thought, why get out of that car? Meanwhile, the Haunted guy looks frankly disappointed. “This just isn’t working. I wear denim jackets and am dead. You don’t get me.”


Winner: Pike



Sorry, Stine. We remember you fondly from study hall, but Pike has triumphed with artistic distinction on his side. May the force of re-issues be with you.



-Jerome Murphy

under the covers: kickass retro spine-tingling cover art

Jerome Murphy offers up a fun and ghoulish journey back to some memorable, creepy book covers of childhood.


Part 1: Traumatize Your Kids 


Long, long ago—in a galaxy far away—book covers were works of beauty, designed to entice the imaginations of a wide reading public. Let us look, as Prospero said to Miranda, into the “dark backward and abysm of time.” Before photoshopped teen models … before movie tie-ins … before our e-readers – to an age when mass market book covers were almost as good –often better – than what awaited readers inside.

10. The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural by Patricia McKissack

Hell yeah, you best be lookin’ over your shoulder with all that cross-hatching coming after you. This cover has the rare distinction of explicitly featuring an African-American. Even better, Brian Pinckney’s moody, Caldecott prize-winning illustrations throughout made this one a winner.

9. The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

This cover basically looks like a young child’s imagination at Halloween. Which is to say, like an acid trip. It fit the kaleidoscopic journey of the characters who explore Halloween customs around the world.

8. Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries

Where are this kid’s parents?

7. Stay Out of the Basement by R.L. Stine

The best of the Goosebumps covers captures the sheer cheesetastic fun of Stine’s phenomenally popular series.

6. The Duplicate by William Sleator

Oh, come on. COME ON. Look at that cover. What should have been cartoonish is totally unsettling and eerie. Long-sleeved horizontal stripes are a big part of that.

5. Urn Burial by Robert Westall

Now, that’s a cover. The underrated Westall crafted the kind of careful, literate YA fiction that’s out of fashion these days. This out-of-print title, about a Scottish teen shepherd uncovering an alien burial site and reigniting an ancient interstellar war, is worth the effort to track down.

4. Something Upstairs by Avi

This cover was educational—is a ghost a solid, a liquid, or a gas?

3. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

You’d think The Black Cauldron would boast the standout art of Alexander’s famous series, but this title presaged the 70’s "Dungeons and Dragons" aesthetic with nightmarish aplomb.

2. Short & Shivery by Robert D. San Souci

Tales from the Crypt, for Kids.

1. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz

The leader, by a mile, of all spine-tingling children’s book covers. You remember these, don’t you? And this cover art was practically "My Little Pony" compared to the pictures inside. Most frighteningly of all, these titles have been reissued with Harry Potter-style illustrations, which ought to raise a blood-curdling cry … of outrage.



Next up: teen edition. R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, and some deep cuts.



-Jerome Murphy

the asylum

My review of Simon Doonan's new book The Asylum is up on the Lambda Literary Review.

Check it out.

The book is fun and dishy.

Also check out Jerome Murphy's review of Frank Bidart's collection of poems Metaphysical Dog, also on Lambda.

skin shift

Nicely written review by Jerome Murphy of Matthew Hittinger's book of poems Skin Shift up on Lambda Literary Review.

Check out Hittinger's post on visual inspirations for the book here.

'django unchained' and the fate of your soul: a post by jerome murphy

That Django Unchained is in some way sinful seems clear. Its tastelessness has the savor of forbidden fruit.

Tarantino’s latest juxtaposes classic Western horseback iconography with Roots-style plantation atrocities. Its script revels in dubiously appropriate moments of comic relief, in which touchy issues are simultaneously raised and dismissed (a neat, if annoying, trick). Relying on intuitive parallels between two uniquely American visions of violence, he makes stylistically free with images of our own American Holocaust, beckoning to fans of slick action extravaganzas.

You make a deal with the devil when you agree to that experience – and Tarantino’s burning brand will settle nicely into the barely healed cicatrix from Inglorious Basterds.

For one thing, it couldn't be too kosher that this white director, backed by a greater economic machine than any African-American director – Spike Lee, say – could have secured for such a venture, appropriates this material for what seems to be the sheer purpose of daring us to watch – and further, daring us to deny our desire to watch.

Or could it?

When else does Middle America witness the beautiful Kerry Washington undergoing the brutality of whipping and face-branding in a way that sears home, with nary a cinematic flinch, exactly what slavery could humanly mean on a day to day basis, and why its psychological scars are to be taken seriously?

White characters largely propel the story, of course; the word unchained underscores abolitionist agency. Jamie Foxx's "man with no name" laconicism in the title role ironically highlights the character’s status as Tarantino’s prop (though it’s worth noting that critics such as Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe disagree, perceiving a powerfully restrained performance). Meanwhile Kerry Washington’s Broomhilda is a vessel of pathos, abstract as her namesake goddess, Brunnhilde. The actors’ efforts to animate these roles remain rather shackled by Tarantino’s script.

Yet if you want to trace the problems of Django along what Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois famously referred to as the color line, where exactly would you draw that line?

Do you condemn this director, who allows himself to be fatally outwitted by his leading man in an unflattering cameo that underscores the fallacy of assumed white supremacy?

Do you condemn Jamie Foxx, subservient to that director but also working to upend our society’s established images of white and black power dynamics?

Or do you condemn Samuel L. Jackson for his role as jiving House Negro, in a parodic performance brilliantly illustrating both the degradation and the sinister utility of that particular costume?

Spike Lee objects that slavery is not a spaghetti western. To which we must respond: nor is slavery Roots, despite that chronicle's more humane endeavor. It is nothing more or less than exactly what it was, and every fictional depiction is artifice, the product of third-party decisions.

That’s not to let Tarantino off the hook for prurient choices: it’s to put us, the consumers, on a hook of our own.

Surely we can admit that we most readily assimilate cultural values not when we quarantine a particular experience as morally heavy, but when we simply sit back and enjoy the ride?

When, for instance, do you readily accept that black characters, male and female, are to be relegated to being de-sexualized foils or comedic garnish for white characters onscreen: while viewing a film explicitly addressing racial tensions, or while absentmindedly taking in another whitewashed J. Lo romantic comedy with Wanda Sykes playing modern-day Mammy? Which is the more pernicious experience? I enjoyed the disposable confection of Monster-in-Law, but was unsettled by “light” fare’s enforcements of social hierarchies.


Likewise, an action flick like the remarkably condescending Avatar, which broke box-office records, masks the bitterness of its insidious substance under copious aesthetic sweetener (and leaving aside questions of cultural hierarchy, one could write a book – albeit no beach read – on Avatar’s anti-science, anti-intelligence, pro-violence hypocrisies).

So this barbecue-sweet genre recipe, palatable to a general audience, catalyzes Django Unchained’s rare medicine. It occurred to me that Kerry Washington and Jamie Foxx’s passionate embrace – two loving and sensual black bodies enjoying the black man not as done-her-wrong scoundrel, but as triumphant champion – was an image not much more familiar to much of that audience than that of the plantation.

You may not care to sign the contract Tarantino is offering here. That’s all right, the devil has plenty of other deals for you. What about the contract you sign when watching the next nihilistic cop-and-gangster show, where people are blown to bits, and car chases are cool and satisfying?

What about the contract you sign with your every endorsement of rap music in which young black men perform roles born of urban desperation for the profit of all?

Or when endorsing popular entertainments that only allow players to assume center stage on the condition of stereotypical, and therefore non-establishment-threatening, behavior?

What about the contracts you sign every day allowing tropes to do with class, race, gender, intelligence or appearance to gain authority by hiding in plain sight?

As a very different fictional slave roared at his Coliseum audience, and, implicitly, us moviegoers: Are you not entertained?

Not that such contracts are equivalent to those offered by Django. Indeed the point is to contrast them, to ask what justifies one over the other. Such decisions must be made consciously if we are not to commit what Toni Morrison calls “the crime of innocence.” (Tar Baby – uneven but excellent book.)

Django Unchained threatens the viewer's comfort precisely by making its trade-off between entertainment and amorality impossible to deny. Thus the film’s failures are decidedly more aesthetic than moral. Which undermines Tarantino's worthwhile subversions more: Django’s relishing overuse of the n-word, or its overlong and inelegantly constructed third act? Of course, one could argue for an overlap between moral failures and failures of craft, beginning with the film’s premise.

This work resonates most as a dizzying elision of iconic shorthand; its title riffs on decades of Western and blaxploitation cinema, and that apellation Django is so janglingly onomatopoetic alongside Unchained. It’s best understood in terms of such riffing, rather than as any attempt at revisionist history. Christoph Waltz’s Dr. Schultz is a tongue-in-cheek reversal of the villainous Colonel Landa in Inglorious Basterds. In Tarantino, very little seems accidental, which is not to say well-advised (the why-not-the-kitchen-sink soundtrack surely overreaches in combining folk, soul, orchestral pomp and hip hop).

One of Django’s drawbacks is that Tarantino’s hyperactive agenda shortchanges provocative ideas, such as the unnerving implication that hip-hop tracks are present-day slave songs. It's perverse to introduce such concepts without sustaining them.

From the shimmering swirl of celluloid visions where many, many movies ago Quentin Tarantino first fished out every stylistic device he would use to stimulate our basest ocular impulses, has floated down to the present day this inevitability: black male vengeance as one more tool of cinematic homage.

This is to say that Django Unchained is problematic and disturbing. It’s giddily entertaining. It’s decadent. It’s offensive. It’s irreverent.

It is a modern-day abolitionist act, which offends most of all by being necessary.


-Jerome Murphy

a poem by jerome murphy

So Far


When heart’s fire is catching some
combustible brush, what sudden

fuss of rain is so ready, dousing flame
in a squall whose seaborne gust

exaggerates the fan of the butterfly wing,
having already wrestled off coast

with a storm from the lash
of some far lover’s eye,

wet with joy, in that country
where we’d overlook anything.



Jerome Ellison Murphy is a New York-based freelance writer, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. His work is featured on the ceiling as you lie awake at 3 a.m.

track appreciation: "someday we'll be together" - a guest post by jerome murphy

The Supremes' swan song, and the last number one hit of the Sixties, ended an era with a bittersweet promise, and sent Berry Gordy's groundbreaking brand name out on a high note with one of the purest pop tracks ever recorded.

First, cutting into silence, a string riff that sounds like the creeping approach of a single one of Wagner's Valkyries, trembling into the blossoming of the orchestra. Then the plucking, a cocoa-butter balm over some bittersweet wound you neglected, of the acoustic guitar refrain. The heart-beating bass and the percussion start up their organic machine, while the strings pull together the threads of a narrative compelling enough to stand by itself (as shown in the instrumental version).

Then, into this billowing water bed, roll the voices - the gospel-sweet, wistful voices whose mmm-mmms savor the tang of their own harmony, offering a return to some childhood that could never have existed - or at least not with such caramel sweetness. "Someday," croon these voices, with the exalted certainty of churchgoing aunts,"we'll be together."

Against this choir enters the cooing, unearthly echo of Diana Ross's most skillfully detached performance, which never once strains for its sentiments - supple, svelte, playful as she delivers the banal lyrics and simple rhymes that speak of lost love, regret, and hope. It's the simple acceptance and matter-of-factness that saves what would otherwise have been insipid, as well as the jazzy semi-scat of her phrasing as the song progresses. "You're far away/ from me, my love/ but just as sure, my, my baby/ as there are stars above/ someday ... we'll be together."

If she sang any harder than she does, you wouldn't believe her. It's her calm assurance that convinces the listener she knows the truth of the situation between these lovers, and accepts it with verve.

By accident, songwriter Johnny Bristol's coaxing ad-libs were engineered into the backing recording, and retained when Motown's quality control realized how perfectly they complemented Ross's vocals. You tell em! interjects the disembodied male voice, as if in response to a sermon, to ground the angelic aspects of the song in a soil of gravelly soul.

The song's real climax and emotional coda comes not with the high note at the bridge - "cry, cry, cryyyyy!" - but a few moments later, with the singer's breathless orgasmic confession that I long for you -- every, every night, punctuated by a single perfectly pitched angel-coo that sums up Ross's inimitable cotton-candy appeal.

Wearing its layers lightly, "Someday We'll be Together" achieves a more puzzling and compelling interplay of elements than would some more straightforward arrangement. Is this a sad song? A joyful song? A hopeful or wistful song? The portrayal of a deluded lover's dream? A danceable soul track? A slow song to listen to alone, with headphones on? A song for the soldiers in Vietnam, as if Lady Liberty herself were making the titular promise over the airwaves? An ironic commentary on the launch of Diana Ross's inevitable solo career (her backup singers on the track were the Andantes, not the latest lineup of the Supremes)?

Multifaceted, "Someday We'll Be Together" sounds both light and monumental, echoing through through the radio ages as both divinely inspired and amiably run-of-the-mill.

It's hard to believe that even at the time, it sounded like something from the present, rather than from an earlier time. It's like the memory of an ice cream cone you had as a kid - one that tasted uniquely sweet before it fell from your fingers. The one you're holding now doesn't quite compare, but surely someday you'll taste something that good again.

- Jerome Murphy

who goes there? - the power of paranoia: a guest post by jerome murphy

Our favorite weird hothouse flower H.P Lovecraft - in all his florid Poesque overwroughtness, with a prose style like wrought-iron curlicued gates - got it right: "“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” With this solid premise, he built dream-castles on rock.

But where the concept really resonates, is in everyday life - where the unknown is not between human and alien, but between Self and Other. A most frightening truth is this: all others are alien. At some level, no one can fully know or trust anyone else. This is why Halloween masks scared me as a kid - they embody this basic insecurity of our experience. Children are still learning how much they can trust parents and teachers, where the boundaries are. Yeah - for me Halloween masks threw a match right on that gasoline.

"Who's there?"- the immortal opening of Hamlet, the prototypical paranoia play. There is a ghost who may or may not be Hamlet's real father, a mother he cannot trust, a play-acting uncle, a play-within-a-play; Hamlet himself pretending madness and innocence (or is he) - and you see? everyone winds up dead.

And so, the Lovecraftian "Who Goes There," a 1930s pulp sci-fi story by John Campbell Jr, has proved endlessly durable, almost adaptable as The Body Snatchers. The shared concept of the alien who mimics the everyday Other handily embodied Cold War-era paranoia, and in later adaptations, our distrust of the military-industrial complex; then fears of infection in the HIV era. Politically, physically, sexually, you can never tell what's inside your neighbor just by looking at them. The strength of The Thing, versus Body Snatchers, was the isolation factor: the characters had to do battle with this basic insecurity in a remote, confined space.

The latest adaptation, a slickly reverse-engineered prequel based on the doomed Norwegian team referenced in Carpenter's version, is itself a shapeshifting blob in the process of digesting earlier influences - particularly Ridley Scott's Alien. The influences are showing clearly in the films transparent digestive tract, kicking and screaming. You've got a no-nonsense female protagonist, a wrecked spaceship, a claustrophobically isolated crew, and flamethrowing. No, really - lots and lots of flamethrowing. You will be hungry for s'mores by the end of this movie.

What this Thing, with its elegantly chilly setting and distended CGI budget fails to tap into, is the power of paranoia. It sits on top of a rich reserve of paranoid storytelling, from Hamlet on down, without striking any oil. The creatures' appearances are not supposed to terrify in and of themselves (and they don't); what terrifies is the swift, sudden revelation of who is not to be trusted.

Enough plot holes for fishnet fetishwear - where do the vehicles come from after being disabled, why is the ship able to work again, how is clothing replicated by the thing - don't matter if you can tap into the elemental power of paranoia, as John Carpenter did. Carpenter's flick made enough gestures (hastily, yes) toward distinct personalities that we had characters we thought we knew. On which pivots the whole enterprise. You had Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley and Keith David on one Arctic team, and you didn't want any of them to be Thinged.

The Thing can only replicate organic matter, but there needs to be organic matter in the first place. Where's the wisecracking ("but it's a dry heat!") from Aliens or any of the necessary touches of eccentricity to show us we're dealing with real live people?

In this gleaming Coors Lite can, few of the interchangeable Norwegians seem human to begin with, so who cares who's the Thing? Oh, that was Lars? Go ahead and torch him, he won't be missed. Yeah, there's the arrogant hubristic professor type. Yeah, there's a token black guy, whose personality is -  the token black guy.

To be fair, like the team members with their fumbling flashlights, the scriptwriters vaguely grasp the resonance of this theme. A clever touch like a radio playing Men At Work's "Who Can It Be Now" signals their awareness. They simply miscalculate how pivotal an element it is to this story's effectiveness.

Attention, horror filmmakers: you're showing too much. More masking. Let our minds interact with the unknowns. That's why Rosemary's Baby works. Why Body Snatchers works. Why flashy CGI is less effective than long hallways, howling wind and subtly suggestive soundtracks, and close ups of faces which may hide something unspeakable. You don't need to assault our senses with orchestral surround-sound. Don't let the monsters wear out their welcome. It's all enough to send you back to Lovecraft and his subtly suggestive tales of masked shapeshifters ("The Thing On the Doorstep," "The Whisperer in Darkness"). Or to the many successful horror flicks which successfully play on the insecurity between the known vs unknown Other, like Carpenter's own They Live, in which the aliens are all around us, wearing attractive human faces. What a nightmare to be one of the few who can see through the exteriors!

Indeed, this is the fundamental, underlying power behind the phrase trick or treat. Which is which?

Or, as a scared child once realized: who needs Halloween, when faces are masks already? The best horror flicks are those that recognize that when it comes to human societies, Halloween is all year round.


-Jerome Murphy

a poem by jerome murphy

Two Masters


The baby would drive us crazy.
Just listen to that dog outside your door
while we nestle in the chill,

our bodies in love. Only pinched nerves
whine so high. No doubt I would savor
the torment of something sentient.

Once, in the unbalanced state
called childhood, I harassed
a cousin’s caged hamster for its

absent-eyed look. It was fretless,
overfed. I wanted to constrict
that little emperor’s belly. How is it

we call ourselves human, when moved
by glandular hungers that make
such menageries—body lust,

money lust, the lust of perception
for limits of sense. Our open yard
of free will has one rickety gate,

a falling-down fence: all that’s missing
is a sign with the Rottweiler’s name.



Jerome Murphy is a New York-based freelancer and administrator in the Creative Writing Program at NYU. He is a member of the Wilde Boys poetry group, and currently loves Szymborska and Valzhyna Mort.

o my darlin

It's was really exciting to edit the latest edition of Clementine (an online journal of poetry and photography) with Becca. I love and admire all of the poets represented.

The issue features five previously unpublished poems by Tim Dlugos, whose collected poems, A Fast Life (edited by David Trinidad) is due from Nightboat Books in 2011. There are also three previously unpublished poems by Karl Tierney. A poet whose work I discovered in the excellent anthology Persistent Voices: An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS.

As always, we tried to represent many different voices. There are two great poems inspired by Curtis Mayfield by Rio Cortez. A Showgirls sestina by Jeffery Conway. Persona poems concerning Amy Winehouse by Kerri French. The subjects of the poems range from Vladmir Putin to video games.

All of the poems--by Jerome Murphy, Sarah Stickney, Charles Jensen, Matthew Hittinger, Jeffrey Allen, Michael Comstock, William Wright, Jenn Blair, Joe Eldridge, Nathan Vulgamott and Steve Westbrook--are smart and refreshing.

I am crazy about the Barbie photos of Russ Pedro and Brian Brown's evocative shots of rural Georgia.

Clementine is interested primarily in the idea of the persona, but we are rather loose with what we consider a "persona poem." Some in the issue are more literal about this than others. Becca and I are proud of what we put together and so happy to share the work of these artists.

colordry

Happy first of May everyone. Here is a lovely, untitled poem from Jerome Murphy.



You dilute as a dropped dye unfolds its tree,
Imbue, in fading reach, this environment

Of fibers outrunning each other for you,
Too colordry to wonder what white meant.

You offer now the same to me.
I take the surest hue I see.


-Jerome Murphy


above painting: Pearl by Kanishka Raja.