Posts filed under 'Reviews'
A well-intentioned supernatural covert-ops thriller from the writer of The Blair Witch Project that may culminate in frustration for some, as the ending is speculative to say the least. On the other hand, there are those of us who appreciate such room for interpretation, and The Objective cannot be accused of being anything but original given the recent trend towards inept war/horror movies such as the tedious Red Sands and the atrocious Zombies of War.
The Objective of the title is itself cloaked in mystery as CIA Agent Ben Keynes is assigned a small Special Ops team to locate and interview a local mystic. This old man may or may not know about the massive radioactive heat signature discovered by satellites deep in an unforgiving terrain of mountains and desert. It becomes apparent that this search is only a part of Keynes’ mission, but whether or not he knows the reasons behind the team’s steady disintegration as they travel deeper into the wilderness is also unclear.
What is clear is the formula Myrick has chosen to apply to The Objective: this is The Blair Witch Project without trees (and witches). He develops a gradual unease as the lost group stumble across wooden triangles stuck in the barren landscape, possibly placed as warnings. Water turns to dust in their canteens and they see vague shimmering shapes in the distance, hazy figures walking into the triangular phenomena before ascending into the sky. As they are picked off one-by-one by a rarely seen force that literally disintegrates its victims (its geometries looking like something that might have come from a mind-meld of pseudo-scientist and new-age sf maverick Eric Von Daniken, and H.P.Lovecraft) the team is no nearer knowing what it is supposed to be doing.
The Objective suffers by its director’s reputation, and by comparison to the aforementioned Blair Witch Project, but it is relatively well-acted and fresh enough to be worthy of your time. Having said that, I’d like to see this script worked into a short story or novella - the reader would undoubtedly enjoy a more subtle and gritty supernatural experience that would make a much greater and longer-lasting impression, as suggestion is often more effective on the page than on screen.
The Objective, 2009
Directed by Daniel Myrick
July 21st, 2010
With the exception of a handful of short stories consistently high in quality and spookiness, Adam Nevill’s singular voice has been quiet in the six years since the publication of his debut novel Banquet for the Damned, which was released as a collectable slipcased hardback by PS Publishing, and more recently in paperback format through the lamentably short-lived Virgin Books horror line which Nevill helmed.
Those years of whispering silence have been fruitful as his second novel, Apartment 16 (plus a third, in-progress), have been picked up by publishing giant Pan MacMillan - an occurrence that (hopefully) has all sorts of positive implications for the genre in this country. A BIG UK publisher buying titles by a UK author? Not something that’s happened since, well, since the days of Clive Barker, and before him, Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert (synchronistically Nevill’s stablemate in horror at Pan MacMillan). From that ‘golden age’ and all that’s gone between (most of it not so nice if you’re a UK-based horror fan or writer) to now is a big gap in time, so whether you like it or not, these facts make Apartment 16 an important novel, and Adam Nevill an important writer who, I’m happy to say, establishes his status amongst today’s outstanding creators of speculative horror with Apartment 16.
Banquet for the Damned is a tale of drop-outs, demonology, shamanism and anthropology, and Nevill parades his influences proudly with every dark paragraph: Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James and Arthur Machen amongst others; and the book’s setting in the grounds of St. Andrews University in Edinburgh allows Nevill to indulge in the arcane atmosphere that academia lends to stories of this nature. In Apartment 16, Nevill again arms himself with these unsettling influences but this time embeds them brick by brick within the (on the surface) classic setting of an apartment block in central London, Barrington House, and then allows them to infiltrate the local environs.
Barrington House brings together two young people from completely different worlds. Seth is a frustrated artist who has taken the job of night porter; a role that naturally appeals to those with a creative bent: not much responsibility beyond sitting at a desk and patrolling the corridors at regular intervals and trying one’s best to ignore the irritating residents - the intervening time spent ‘creating’. (And on reading, it will come as no surprise that Nevill spent a good few years doing just this when he was writing Banquet for the Damned). Seth and the residents of Barrington house are haunted by the noises echoing down the corridors from the depths of apartment 16.
Apryl is an American staying for a couple of weeks to tidy up the affairs of her Great Aunt Lillian who recently passed away, leaving Apryl and her mother the substantial inheritance of an apartment in Barrington House. Apryl soon becomes obsessed with Lillian’s story, beautifully depicted in the mementos and memories she finds in Lillian’s flat, the clothes left behind, and a series of notebooks that painfully and mysteriously describe her last days, and of her heartbreak at her husband’s death:
Highgate and the Heath are entirely lost to me now. I have accepted this. I went there to remember so many of the walks we took together. But they will have to live on in memory alone. And I haven’t seen St. Paul’s in at least six months. I cannot get near the city. It is too difficult. After my episode on the underground, I have sworn off travelling below ground. The breathlessness and anxiety may be acute outdoors in the street, but they are doubly so below ground in those tight tunnels. Even my afternoons at the Library and British Museum in Bloomsbury are in jeopardy.
Nevill fluently depicts the supernatural atmosphere and how it has manifested across the years in the psychological and physical breakdowns of Barrington House’s stubborn and scared elderly residents (lending them and the House a colourful history that captures the antiquity of the genre we love so much within the very souls of the residents), and how it does so in the rather desperate lives of those younger characters who serve the House’s ageing population, the porters.
His writing shows an almost perfect melding of the old and the new: the raw atmospherics of Blackwood, the subtle and oh so terrifying nearly-glimpsed horrors on the periphery of M.R. James’ and H.P. Lovecraft’s imaginations; the masterly development of buildings and environments as characters and vessels, (much in the same way as Stephen King’s infamous Overlook Hotel’s room 217 channels Jack Torrance’s psychological deterioration in The Shining); and a cutting contemporary miserablism describing everyday urban hopelessness that is as grim and inevitable as the spiral into which Seth and Apryl find themselves descending. Put simply, he writes damn unsettling prose:
And after he gathered his breath, his balance, his shaky sense of place and self, he noticed the background in which the figure was suspended. This peformance of violence and fragmentation was nothing without the depths behind it. Baboon-snouted and eyeless, but horribly twisted in the vestment of a floral housecoat, bloddied and still moist, the figure hung upon complete darkness. A total absence that still managed to transmit the cold of deep space and the ungraspable length and breadth of forever.
Apartment 16 is a deeply disturbing hypnotic experience exploring obsessions taken to extremes and beyond, and Adam Nevill has an imagination that rends itself into pure darkness for our reading pleasure.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
- Read Joseph D’Lacey’s in-depth interview with Adam Nevill here at Horror Reanimated which also provides more information on Banquet for the Damned.
May 6th, 2010
The zombie Nazi film sub-genre is, like everything else these days, not the obscure, difficult to discover (and fund) thing it once was. The atmospheric Outpost (although, were they really zombies, or ghosts, or…?), and the blood-drenched zombedy Dead Snow both made positive contributions to the list that began with Shockwaves back in 1977 and then all but expired with the mouldy cheese that was Oasis of the Zombies (1981) and Zombie Lake (1981).
The most recent addition to the canon (although it was made in 2006) is the ultimately disappointing Zombies of War (as it’s known in the UK on DVD; Horrors of War elsewhere). Many of the reviews on the Internet Movie Database have referred to ZoW as being referential to the ‘classic’ B war movies of old, but, you know, arguably there’s not much call for this sort of approach these days, (unless you’re Tarantino), so as someone states, why bother?
ZoW has a plot that is pure cliché, as admittedly do pretty much all of the Nazi/war zombie films (with the exception of Dead Snow): the war is going badly for the Germans; they do some occult research; make a few scientists do some taboo research on prisoners and willing, brainwashed volunteers – the result being ‘secret super soldiers’ that they are convinced will change the course of the war. Except they won’t, we all know that, as a team of Allied troops are parachuted in behind enemy lines to nip the esoteric experiments in the bud.
The Germans in ZoW have absolutely no chance when you consider there are only two or three of these super soldiers dotted around the countryside as far as the viewer can tell. They take a couple of shots to the head to put down, and, oh yes, the US infantryman who is attacked and turned by a werewolf (!) early on in proceedings, ends up being very influential in the final battle. In fact, you don’t come across a zombie until about forty minutes into the film, the first few scenes of action being wholly and strangely lycanthrope-orientated and set in the same stretch of woods, despite hours of marching.
Can one recommend a film based upon some of its ideas alone? Not in this case unfortunately, although something in me does like the idea of partisan werewolves attacking Nazi zombies; and a bigger occult picture is hinted at, but I guess, budgets dictated otherwise. ZoW could have been a fun experience, given a much bigger budget, better and tighter storyline and directed by an auteur such as Tarantino or his mate, Rodriguez.
ZoW has obviously been re-titled to take advantage of chumps like me who snap up anything zed-related, so it is my important duty to advise you to avoid at all costs, not just because of the lack of convincing acting, the average special effects, but mainly because Zombies of War doesn’t know what it is.
Zombies of War, 2006
Directed by John Whitney and Peter John Ross
April 23rd, 2010
It happens less frequently than I’d like; a contented glow of time well-spent: 103 minutes of hybrid sf/horror that one is happy to place alongside peers such as Event Horizon, the Alien series, The Dark Hour, Pitch Black and…, well there aren’t many more to add to that list. Pandorum is a prime example of learning from what’s gone before and upping the ante to create an effectively tense and challenging experience with an originality all of its own.
Many years from now, as the Earth becomes a nuclear battleground for ownership of its failing resources, the Elysium is sent into deep space with a cargo of 60,000 sleeping people and the DNA of most of the planet’s flora and fauna; a modern ark, maintained by several crews who will be woken-up in turn as the years pass, bound for the single planet that has been identified as earth-like, Tanis; their mission, to start again.
Astronauts Bower and Peyton, from Team 5, wake from their hyper-slumbers into a world of claustrophobic darkness: the Elysium is shutting down, its reactor gradually slowing and the power drained from all but the most basic of functions. Added to this is the memory-loss that long-term sleepers suffer upon waking – and they’ve been asleep a long, long time; and the increasing threat of mental breakdown and violent paranoia – Pandorum. As Bower explores the ship, attempting to make his way to the reactor he encounters several other survivors turned feral, and a race of possibly mutated and ferociously ravenous savages straight out of The Descent/Ghosts of Mars creature blender.
So what’s new, I hear you cry. Nothing much if I’m honest, but as I wrote above Pandorum takes certain tropes and specific elements from the sf/horror sub-genre and convincingly makes them its own. The atmosphere and cinematography are downright grimy, the Elysium is Nostromo’s big brother - all its corridors are dank and dripping after years of decay. None of the crews have been around to maintain the ship’s vast, maze-like structure and systems. The creatures are hyper-violent, scuttling across the corroding surfaces of the cavernous Elysium, and although the reason for their being there is rather nebulously explained, their presence and constant stalking threat ramps up the tension to almost unbearable levels á la The Descent.
The gradual return of Bower and Peyton’s personal and professional memories, combined with the stories of the survivors, develop into a history of the last moments of the human race on Earth, the breakdown of the crew of the Elysium, and a desperate fight for its future in a colossal sleeper-ship that knows it’s time to die.
As with The Dark Hour, Pandorum’s ending is wonderfully surprising, powerfully apt and contrasts completely with what’s gone before. It allows for a sequel, (although it’s unlikely as it didn’t perform well in cinemas), but they should leave it as it is: a clever, terrifying and uplifting film that will surely develop a cult following on DVD.
Pandorum, 2009
Directed by Christian Alvart
March 17th, 2010
Those of you with your fingers on the Horror Reanimated pulse – er, I mean flatline – will know I rarely review books. However, every now and again something truly unique comes along. Mendal Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is one of those books.
It’s difficult to attract attention to a novel without ruining its mystique but that’s my aim with this post. This is an unmissable read.
1974 was a good year for horror. Carrie was published and so was this little frightener. One of the authors went on to greater works, greater wealth and greater fame. The other was dead within two years. Interestingly, both men had trouble with alcohol. In Johnson’s case it was the death of him; he succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. And, whereas King is wonderfully prolific, Johnson died leaving only three unfinished manuscripts. He was 48.
The plot: Bobby and Cindy’s parents go on holiday for a week, leaving a pretty babysitter named Barbara in charge. Along with their friends John, Dianne and Paul, the kids call themselves Freedom Five. They’ve been playing games together for years. The day after the parents leave, Freedom Five ‘capture’ Barbara and a new game begins.
I don’t want to say too much about the story. If you have a genuine interest in dark fiction, you should read the book. Here, in glorious black on white, is torture porn from thirty-five years ago. I expected it to be badly handled and poorly written. Neither was the case. Mendal Johnson wrote in tight, measured prose which is, on occasion, beautiful to read. This wasn’t just a book of vicarious thrills either – though, believe me, they are there if you want them – it was an examination of the psychology of children, and therefore, of our own. Each character is fully and tragically realised; their logic and the logic of the novel itself, though twisted, is always rightly fulfilled. The pace and plotting is near to flawless, tension rising all the time. The moment you put the book down, you want to pick it up again and, if you have the time, it’s one of those you could read in a sitting – if you can handle it.
I’m not saying LGPATA is an accurate appraisal of your average child’s mind. Freedom Five are a little isolated. They are a little odd. A situation arises in which their earlier games together can be explored further. One thing leads to another and group ‘morality’ overcomes the morality of the individual. But what I’m also not saying is that these things never happen. They do and it’s well documented. Cases occurred before the book was written and many more have occurred since. And that, perhaps, is what makes the book so utterly chilling. Whether victim or perpetrator, it could be your child. It could have been you. Maybe it was. Who is really prepared to speak of the questionable things we did in our ‘innocent’ youth?
This author, for one, is.
For a truly in depth look at the life of Mendal Johnson and more background about the novel – read it first, if you don’t want it spoiled – there’s a brilliant 3-part blog covering it all right here.
November 12th, 2009
You’ll no doubt have encountered the furore this movie has generated over the past few months and while I’m loath to add to the noise, I don’t think it’s possible to not have a debate over a film of this nature. Although divided into several chapters with titles including Grief, Pain and Despair, for me, Antichrist is a film of two parts: the first two-thirds and the final third; this latter segment no doubt being responsible for its seeming adoption or alignment by and with the horror genre.
Antichrist commences with an extended scene, shot in black and white, and set to a classical soundtrack. No dialogue, just detailed slow-motion shots of the flat in which the Man and the Woman (the characters are unnamed and I’ll not mention the actor and actresses names either) are making love, and (ooh how controversial) a single second scene of penetration. During this activity their young son walks down the stairs, climbs onto a desk and falls out of the window. It’s a memorable, simple and stylish way to begin a film that soon loses itself in analysis, atmosphere and ambiguity.
The Man is a therapist who feels he knows more about his wife’s bereavement and guilt issues than the staff at the hospital, so he discharges her, taking care of her at home; a move which soon comes across as selfish, as the woman increasingly feels like an experimental subject. Perhaps in response she demands increasingly physical sex and self-harms as the influence of nature gradually manifests itself and her guilt grows. The Man decides they should spend time at their utterly remote cabin in the woods, Eden, where the Woman spent time writing her dissertation on medieval misogyny and where, we find out, she fell into believing what she was writing about, rather than critiquing it.
Von Trier dedicates the film to Andrei Tarkovsky, the famed Russian Director of Andrei Rublev, Stalker and Solaris among others, and it’s with these last two films that Antichrist resonates the most as von Trier utilises several of Tarkovsky’s filmic techniques such as long, uninterrupted scenes, and the black and white dialogue free passages. Like Tarkvosky, Von Trier in Antichrist has given the earth, nature, the elements and the animal kingdom, an alien and ambiguous intelligence that seeps into the minds of the Man and the Woman so that their time sent in Eden becomes a wildly surging series of experiences and emotions: as the cabin’s tin roof is constantly bombarded with acorns from the huge trees it sits beneath; in harsh, visceral and surreal encounters with crows and a talking fox (which I found extremely powerful and perfect within that segment of the film, as opposed to many who have simply laughed).
As the Woman experiences the highs and lows of self-realisation it is the Man, the therapist, who appears most-affected as the landscape becomes an immense primal force that overwhelms them both; as he works with her to overcome her fear of the grass that swirls around the cabin, he is seeing visions that warn him of impending chaos. It is here where Antichrist veers away from what I took, (wanted?), to be an intriguing, ambitious exploration into the nature of nature and its influence on our relationships, towards a graphic depiction of torture and survival rooted in the deep mental illness resulting from a child’s death. Driven on by their surroundings, unable to cope with the sheer size of the environment and their emotions, their physical relationship intensifies into matrimonial violence: genital mutilations being the worst of many outrages inflicted upon and by each other.
The furore surrounding Antichrist has been mostly about its easy to criticise elements: the sex, the violence, its so-called pretentiousness, von Trier’s reputation and even his supposed attitude towards women. I bet even von Trier isn’t sure what he’s trying to say some of the time but, for me, Antichrist is an extremely brave film; as with Tarkovsky’s works, its attempts to depict this unknowable and unquantifiable world we live in and the unpredictable and unfathomable ways we humans relate to it and to each other, are absolutely open to debate and interpretation, and that’s the point. Two-thirds wonderful.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
November 7th, 2009
A new independent British zombie film following in the footsteps of the adequate The Zombie Diaries, and the more polished, if unseen to date, The Dead Outside (will someone please give these guys a DVD deal? In fact, put all three movies into a cool little box-set please), Colin has been touted around with the story of a £45 budget spent on tea and biscuits. If that’s true then all well and good, but the film itself certainly stands up to geek analysis without the aid of a gimmicky marketing campaign, and will receive a deserved short run and DVD release in October.
Colin is the eponymous central character whom we meet returning home one afternoon. It soon becomes apparent there’s anarchy in the streets of Wandsworth, South London as gunshots and explosions fill the City air and he washes his blood-soaked hands and knife. Colin has been bitten and after fighting off his flatmate we witness his inevitable un-birth. The film then follows our hero around the streets of London as he slowly descends into a state of fully-fledged zombie. For a zed geek like me this is one of the most interesting aspects of the film as, initially, Colin appears to have a certain amount of intelligence to his actions, maybe considering whether or not to tuck into some easily available flesh as the more developed around him flood the streets and chase down the unfortunate survivors.
Colin wanders around, occasionally chowing down, mostly on the already dead, possibly learning from the actions of the others. There are some interesting victims, notably the man who is being eaten alive while he listens to his MP3 player, a gadget which attracts Colin’s attention for a while. There are a couple of episodes where our hero disappears amongst the whole zombie horde, such as the time when he stumbles into a townhouse where four students are fending off a whole front room of the undead. As sheer weight of numbers overwhelms them the scene does actually become fairly harrowing and only one girl escapes. We follow her as she breaks into a seemingly disused garage where a sleazy bloke seems to be torturing zombies by removing their eyes. Again, it’s an intense scene, but its effect is somewhat dampened by the fact you can’t see what’s going on most of the time, and it’s so unexpected and jarring when set against the carnage in the streets. Director Marc Price should be commended for trying something a little different with these interludes, and with Colin being almost totally from an undead perspective.
Price also succeeds with his decision to introduce a sub-plot wherein his sister realises he’s a zombie, and with some mates captures him in an effort to see if he can remember who he is was/is. These poignant scenes are well balanced by her mates’ dislike for Colin in his current state, and the decision they must make when it becomes obvious he cannot be ‘returned’. (Another geek note of interest – apparently, immersing a zed’s head in a bath of water will calm it down temporarily).
Colin is surprisingly well-acted given the majority of its cast were recruited via Facebook and MySpace, although it helps that the majority of the film is without dialogue, and where there is speech it is mostly experienced from Colin’s point-of-view. Being sympathetic to a central character is a prerequisite of most films; the viewer’s interaction with Colin is no different as we know just enough about him to care and as the story unfolds and he descends into a new form of life this sympathy only increases.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
October 25th, 2009
THE SUBSTITUTE
Directed by Ole Bornedal
Written by Ole Bornedal and
Henrik Prip
(Review contains spoilers!)
I had to watch this Danish film twice to make sure I was correct in my initial reaction to it. This film, about a substitute teacher (actually a chicken farmer’s wife who is infected, almost “SLiTHER”-style, by an alien spore) and her wary class of 6th graders is freakin’ hilarious!!
When Ulla Harms (the delightful and delightfully named Paprika Steen) shows up to sub for a teacher who has come down with salmonella poisoning, the students are horrified at how she insults the kids: one boy has buck teeth – she tells him to correct something on the blackboard but be careful not to trip over his teeth on the way. And when she finds something funny, there is no holding back her mirth – she guffaws almost to the point where someone REALLY needs to slap her or she will piddle on herself.
One of her students, the withdrawn and picked-upon Carl (Jonas Wandschneider) who lost his mother recently in a car accident, starts to notice things about Ulla that just don’t add up. How she read his mind in class, how she knew every student’s name without consulting any sort of seating chart, how she just…knew everything (the students started quizzing her with complex math equations which she promptly answered, adding “Everyone knows that.”). During recess, Carl sees Ulla standing in front of a window, completely “switched-off”. Oooeeeeoooo!!
Other strange things occur when things aren’t going Ulla’s way – her first day in class, the students are fighting when every single one of their cell phones go off plus she has the ability to change what comes out of a student’s mouth, if it’s an insult to Ulla. My favorite was when poor Albert of the teeth (Jakob Fals Nygaard) tries to call Ulla a “cruel monster” and it kept coming out as “cool hamster”.
At a hastily called parent-teacher meeting, when Ulla is running late, Carl observes her with her satchel and a strange large silver ball. And what he sees that ball do… Well, you will just have to check this movie out.
The children gather the courage to break into Ulla’s home which is deserted, unlived-in, with huge piles of broken furniture in every room. While there, Ulla returns home and the students manage to avoid her until she decides to have some “lunch”. The kids run screaming from her house. Of course, later that evening when the students are tyring to get their parents to understand what they saw, the parents decide to pay Ulla a visit and, naturally, the house is immaculate and beautifully decorated. Carl’s friend, Philip (Nikolaj Falkenberg-Klok) even whispers to Carl that he knew this would happen.
Slowly, the parents of the students come to adore Ulla and in a particularly hilarious scene, after the 6th graders have earned a trip to Paris with their crazy teacher, it is every 6th grader for themself, fighting getting on the bus, fighting their parents – you just have to see it. Everyone calms down, though, when Carl’s father, Jesper (Ulrich Thomsen) announces that since the original bus driver was sick from salmonella poisoning (detecting a pattern here?) and Jesper knows how to drive a bus, the students reluctantly board the bus but the shots of them with their faces pressed to the windows, saying “goodbye” to their parents is also funny – they act as though they are “walking the Green Mile”.
I could tell you a LOT more about this little gem of a movie: the mysterious map Carl finds, the ooga-booga moment Carl has when Ulla comes to have dinner with him and his father (who Ulla seems to have designs on), Ulla’s family’s past and the REAL reason Ulla is there, as well as the final scene between Ulla and Carl and a “pressing machine” at the chicken farm, but you should really enjoy it without too many spoilers. Very funny with some unexpected scares, very original and Ulla can be downright creepy. And then there are the chickens…
One word of advice: I have read several viewer complaints about how badly dubbed this movie is. Well, a simple solution to THAT “problem” is, when setting up the film, click on Danish Dolby instead of English Dolby and you will get an undubbed film with English subtitles. Problem solved,
Review by Elaine Lamkin
August 2009
September 7th, 2009
Red Sands is Alex Turner’s follow-up to the undeniably eerie Dead Birds, an American civil war period piece, involving a squad of soldiers coming across a terrifying house situated in a field of corn, haunted by vaguely Lovecraftian horrors. In Red Sands Turner takes the same set-up and updates it to Afghanistan, placing a unit of American soldiers in an isolated location and spooking them out with a series of strange phenomena and bloody deaths; except, this time it doesn’t work.
Charged with seizing and then monitoring an important road the soldiers get lost due to some random artillery fire, come across some ruins and out of boredom (regardless of the fact they’ve just been attacked) set about shooting up the statues carved in the sides of the red sandstone hills. This act of ignorance unleashes a Djinn which then takes its revenge on the soldiers. We know it’s a Djinn because there’s a plaque in the stone that says so.
The problem with Red Sands is that at the very beginning of the film you are shown who survives, and because you also know what’s shape-shifting and taking on the appearance of those it kills, causing hallucinations and generally making their stay in a strangely abandoned stone house uncomfortable (especially as the radio is unusable and the jeep’s engine is mysteriously ripped out) there’s absolutely no intrigue, suspense or surprise to the experience.
The shallow and clichéd characters of the soldiers are played by the numbers (why does every radio operator have glasses, and be literately nerdy?) The shadowy interior setting of the house is way too dark to see any detail; and there is a tired re-use of ideas from Dead Birds – a lot of the decent effects are dark, hollow eyes and wide gaping mouths of those victims sucked dry by the Djinn; admittedly they are scary the first time around, but if you’ve seen them once…
Ultimately, and unfortunately because I really wanted to like it, Red Sands is a disappointing and predictable film.
Reviewed by Mathew F. Riley
[This review was originally published in the Spring 09 edition of Prism, the Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society]
September 3rd, 2009
Banquet for the Damned combines several very real elements – night terrors, shamanism, anthropology, witchcraft and heavy metal – in a very real location; St. Andrews. It’s one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. I had shivers across my skin as I discovered within its pages the histories of the covens of Europe and the studies of evil spirits and familiars in the shamanic traditions of South America and Africa.
Into this world of student revelry and stuffy intellectualism, comes a renegade writer and explorer of altered realities, Eliot Coldwell. And he’s brought something nasty with him. Something hungry. Students begin to disappear from the campus.
At the same time, following the break up of their band, guitarists Dante Shaw and his best friend Tom travel to St. Andrews. They plan to meet Eliot Coldwell, Dante’s spiritual hero and author of the notorious cult novel, Banquet for the Damned. Dante intends to make a concept album using Eliot and his work as the theme.
But instead of finding inspiration in St. Andrews, Dante discovers nightmares stalking the town’s ancient streets…
*
It’s no secret that Bloody Books and Virgin Horror were in direct competition for the same share of the genre market. When the Virgin line folded, we were kind of pleased to be left in the game.
Horror Reanimated seeks the best in the genre and, as time went by, we featured Virgin titles and talked to their authors. (See our posts on Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams). Having read plenty of Virgin Horror, it now strikes me as tragic that such high quality fiction will no longer issue forth from that elegantly twisted horn of plenty.
My most recent read was ‘Banquet for the Damned’ by Adam L G Nevill. Originally published by PS Publishing, this title gripped me as hard as any supernatural tale ever has. It is a superbly crafted, beautifully told and genuinely frightening novel. As a final tribute to a noble and prematurely buried imprint, I bring you a candid interview with Adam L G Nevill, author of Banquet and editor of the Virgin Horror line.
We honour the genre’s slain; enemy and friend alike, generals and foot soldiers equally. Why? Because when you throw the festering undead into a pit, they stick together!
But that’s not all. Adam has recently proved himself truly undead having risen again with a major two-book deal…
Joseph D’Lacey: Adam, I’m going to thank you in advance for agreeing to what I realise may be an uncomfortable interview for you following the termination of your horror list.
But I’d like to talk to you first about Banquet for the Damned. This novel came right out of leftfield and slammed me hard upside the head. I’d long believed my supernatural ‘fear’ nerve to be burned out through overuse. Apparently not. What chilled me about the story was the depth of research the characters had done on witchcraft, familiars and evil spirits. It was all too real. What can you say to reassure me that you made it all up?
Adam L G Nevill: Thanks for the really kind words JD’L, and for reading it so carefully. There is nothing more satisfying than finding an ideal reader.
As for reassurance that it’s all fiction, who can say … Night terrors are an absolutely real and universal form of sleep disturbance long associated with witchcraft. My story is inspired by the many actual histories of witchcraft and demonology that I read and researched. And the authors of those tomes were pretty convincing …
While I was based in St Andrews and matriculated at the university, I discovered the most incredible archive of old books on the occult bequeathed to the university library by a former rector. And the university also has a world class anthropology department, with some terrific sources on the occult and superstition in the developing world too. I remember having 40 books on witchcraft and the supernatural on my post-grad library card, when a curious librarian finally asked me what I was doing at the university. It was Lovecraftian – some of the books had not been borrowed since the sixties and I would scurry back to my room and pore over them. I had a year up there and had the time to read dozens of secondary texts on the subject of the unworldly. From that I took great creative license with specific histories and idioms to create the sense that my fictional scholars were authorities in order to make the supernatural element seem authentic. I blended bits and pieces from many documented stories and phenomenon to create my own history of a forgotten pagan god/witch’s familiar that had been called by many different names and moved through the ages, worshipped by one cult or another. I wanted its origins and long story to reflect the patterns of how real history is interpreted and revised, so that even the documentation and sources seemed authentic.
Making the supernatural believable in a modern setting is no easy task, so the carefully wrought history, the scholars, the academic environment, are designed to add credence to a preposterous notion I want a reader to accept. I lose interest in so much horror fiction because of its errant silliness from the beginning, but well-researched books like Matheson’s Hell House, Blatty’s Exorcist and Legion, or most recently Simmon’s The Terror and Brookes’s World War Z unsettle you far more because of that sense of authenticity and plausibility. Place the unrecognisable subtly amongst the recognisable and it’s easier for a reader to lose themselves in a story.
JD’L: Great. Like I’ll sleep a wink tonight knowing all that.
Our resident supernatural horror author, Bill Hussey, doesn’t believe in ghosts, spirits or the afterlife. Aside from the research angle, how much actual experience of the supernatural do you have? Do you think there’s a world we can’t see, a world where dark forces conspire to enter ours?
ALGN: I suffered dreadful night terrors while writing the book. I’d never had them before. Bizarrely, two readers have emailed me to declare the same while reading it. Which would suggest we all induced them subconsciously while either writing or reading a book featuring vivid night terrors. Or, I do wonder, did I make myself receptive to a phenomenon that was actually there anyway? I began the book in St Andrews, but continued writing the novel’s first draft for 18 months in Kent, when these experiences occurred. I would awake periodically to see the outline of a very tall and thin figure standing before the curtains of my room, silhouetted by both the ambient light passing through the curtains and by a thin line of red light, like fire, around its shape. I would sit up, pinch myself, blink, make certain I was fully awake, but the figure would remain there, more or less at the foot of my bed, staring. You can imagine the terror. I even called out and challenged it on a number of occasions, but received no response. It would eventually walk the length of the room, then turn and vanish through the door. I base one scene in Banquet on what I experienced. My landlord in Kent was deeply uncomfortable with such talk, and his girlfriend told me of a family tragedy involving fire which explained his reticence. I said no more about it, but she also pointed out to me how a second shadow would follow my landlord from room to room in this lovely old house we lived in. And sure enough, it did. The second shadow was a different size.
Add to that, as an undergraduate, while billeted in halls that were once part of a military hospital, I would often wake because someone was standing beside my bed and leaning over me, with their face close to mine. It used to scare me witless. Door handles would also turn, doors would open, no one would come through, though other residents at the end of the corridor featuring the affected rooms would see a woman in a white uniform entering or leaving.
On holiday, in an old cottage in Dorset, we would sit in the living room and hear footsteps walk the length of the rooms upstairs. It was terrifying at first, but by the end of the week we became accustomed to the walking figure (though no one would go to the toilet alone). The owners of the cottage informed me that nearly every visitor experiences a haunting there and someone even took a photo of the ghost, looking through a window. Needless to say, we never went back, and I am relieved it was not me that saw that face at the window.
Add a whole raft of inexplicable sixth sense experiences to these brushes with the uncanny, as well as the fact that everyone has a ghost story, so I don’t rule out ‘activity’ after death. Both positive and negative activity (most of our family hauntings were positive farewells from the recently departed, and I have two relatives with psychic tendencies). I may revile religious fundamentalism, and am no fan of most organised religion either, but I do find the current atheistic lobby tedious. And believing in nothing but status and money seems to be a modern dilemma.
I think the very act of writing has an element of mysticism involved too, and I have sympathies with Machen and Blackwood’s creative visions, who were both mystical writers. A deep involvement in fiction, both reading and writing, has also given me transcendent experiences and I wouldn’t be without them.
JD’L: Banquet is set in locations that are very well known to you. Dante and Tom set off from Birmingham and spend 
most of the novel in St. Andrews. To begin with, I thought these real locations were going to kill my suspension of disbelief. In the end the effect was the opposite. Such was the power of the writing that I could see the streets of St Andrews and its old buildings and dark alleyways – even though I’ve never been there. How important do you think the setting was to the success of the novel?
ALGN: Thanks again JD’L. St Andrews is pretty much a character in the novel. I drove up there knowing I wanted to write a novel of supernatural horror, with a vague idea of the story featuring a notorious but nearly forgotten book and occult scholar. But when I received my first sighting of the town, I knew I had found my setting. The town was such a tremendous inspiration – it is one of those places that make the supernatural seem possible. The wealth of history, the architecture, the tributes to martyrs, the shadowy courts, the very age of the place, just conjured macabre fantasies. I was absurdly terrified of doing it an injustice, and was so enthusiastic about the town, I did my absolute best to recreate it in language as precisely as I was able at the time. Again, I do think a detailed sense of place and conjuring of atmosphere through specific details lays the ground for the insertion of the implausible, the impossible, and aids the suspension of disbelief. The very physical presence of the ancient town, twinned with extensive reading, allowed the story to write itself. So without St 
Andrews, there would have been no Banquet.
JD’L: There are so many passages in Banquet that are a delight to read. The story is magnetic but the way you tell it is reminiscent of the literary styles of bygone horror authors. It put me very much in mind of M. R. James. Was that a deliberate ‘one-off’ or is this the voice of Adam L G Nevill that we can expect to hear again? I’m particularly interested in your answer because I know you’ve had some good news recently…
We’ll get to that soon…
ALGN: I do wear my influences on my sleeve in Banquet. And M R James was the chief mentor that guided my hand. My dad read many of the classic supernatural writers to my brother and I when we were boys: James, Poe, Mare, Collier, and his shelves were groaning with Lovecraft and Blackwood, which I then explored on my own. Such dark matter had a deep impact on my imagination at that age – I truly experienced what one critic called “the sublime of terror” – and I was pretty much destined to try and recreate it in my own fiction at some point. So my reading of the canon of the supernatural in fiction will always be apparent, and I’m deeply in debt to the classic masters. As I also am to the modern masters in the field. Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, and Ramsey Campbell have taken the weird tale to the mountain, not only in terms of their actual bodies of work, but in a mastery of language and style that few can be consistently compared to in any genre. All three of those writers have given me wonderful examples of introducing more speculative and surreal elements to a treatment of the supernatural in fiction. I think this is evident in my second novel. I also think it’s worth mentioning that your development as a writer is in tune with your development as a reader. I was never sophisticated enough as a reader 
when I first began writing seriously, but by reading great writers patiently, pennies began to drop. So often these days I’ll pick up a book and think, this writer hasn’t read enough.
JD’L: Banquet is a brilliant example of the triumph of style over gratuity. It’s tense and claustrophobic and the exact nature of the evil remains veiled even when you describe it directly. When violence and malevolence occur, when blood is spilled, it’s done with great delicacy and poetry. How did you manage this?
ALGN: When describing the supernatural, producing risible descriptions is probably the easiest thing to do. And it is the bane of the field. Fear is also difficult to describe. Producing clarity and impact, is bloody hard. I doubt there are many books as bad as bad horror novels, nor films for that matter as bad as bad horror films, but there are few books or films as powerful as great horror novels and films. I aspired to, and looked to, the best in the genre. I pretty much took two years out from work and lived on about three grand a year, in the late nineties, to deliberately hone the craft and improve as a writer. I paid a lot of attention to cultivating subtlety through glimpses and suggestions, as opposed to full reveals. There are no better examples of this style in the field than in the fiction of M R James, who only wrote fiction with the full intention of frightening and disturbing a reader. It was my goal to combine the stylistic traits of the better late Victorian and the Edwardian authors, like James, within a thoroughly modern multi-plot structure that Stephen King and Dan Simmons made their own, and to also write in the present tense to emulate a cinematic feel. If a reader could accept that immediate-tense narration, I hoped the actual appearances of the supernatural in the novel might take on a more vivid nature within the reader’s imagination. Perhaps in a personal film. I also wanted the power of a short story to endure throughout a long novel. What was I thinking? In hindsight, I realise many seem to believe that it cannot be achieved in a horror novel. Stylistically, it was a bloody ambitious book to write, though the occult element may appear conservative and ‘old school’ to many as it deals with possession and witchcraft. So, Banquet was every bit as much of an example of a new writer trying to achieve a particular set of criteria within a novel, and also hoping that it would be a good story for an average reader who would be unaware of the scaffolding.
Did it work? It took three years of constant revision to complete the book, and I remember being profoundly disappointed when I finished it. Looking back, and reading generous praise from readers, I feel much happier with that debut.
I also read a terrific thesis by Peter Penzholdt, in which he identified and explored various treatments of the supernatural in fiction, including M R James. His study identified techniques that I was only occasionally stumbling across, on an instinctive level as a writer, and wondering afterwards how I’d achieved a certain affect. His study helped me find more consistency. My tutors at St Andrews were also poets, and poets are masters of language, which is why I chose St Andrews in the first place to study writing formally. I never doubted my ideas, but I was right to doubt my ability at expressing them. I desperately needed a mentor – someone who could look at my actual writing and tell me what was wrong with it. Get the actual writing right first, is the best advice I can give anyone. At times the criticism was crushing and I doubted whether I should even continue writing. I’d go back to my room after a tutorial, deflated. But by the end of the year, I’d experienced nothing short of a personal renaissance. I learnt how the use of simple, innocent diction, in a calculated and coercive fashion, can build and build, and prove more powerful than the use of language that on its own, in isolation from the rest of a sentence, carries an unpleasant meaning. I eschewed the latter, and used the former. M R James preferred “wet” to “slimy” and I do too. Good poets and short story writers consider the music and image of every descriptive word to create the desired effect. I’ll approach every scene in that way, then look at how these scenes are attached to the one preceding and following, and then rework to maintain fluency and pace without losing descriptive power in the set-pieces. Above all I learned that good writing is all about rewriting. Draft after draft with long breaks in between each draft. Eventually when the removal of one comma will cause a total collapse, it’s as good as it will get.
JD’L: When readers see a book on a shelf and the name on its spine they rarely understand the time and effort that put it there. I’m not just talking about the novel they’re actually looking at either. So much more has to have already happened for the miracle of publication to occur. At times, I even think other authors believe those with bigger, better deals or greater sales figures have somehow lucked into it overnight. Can you tell us a little about the crests and troughs you’ve ridden from dream to publication?
ALGN: Banquet was complete in 2000. I began it in late 1997. But by 2002 every agent who accepted fiction in the Writers and Artists Yearbook had eventually turned down my letter of introduction. I don’t think anyone ever read a word of the actual book. “No horror” being the usual refrain, or “too many authors already”. And as no publisher took unsolicited manuscripts, that was that. Game over. By then, I’d forsaken a career in television a second time. I was living on a shoe-string (again) and enduring an existence above an old pub in East London and working nights as a security guard. And going mad with sleep deprivation and a sense of despair. Only my erotica novels kept me afloat.
From 1997 onwards, I was lucky enough to be published as an author of erotica. I wrote nine novels in total, for Virgin Books’s Nexus imprint (which I was asked to edit in late 2004). Approximately one each year, so I carried on cutting my teeth in another genre that was box-office back in the nineties, while horror seemed all but dead as a mainstream publishing concern. My Nexus books kept me going. Built morale. It was pulp fiction under a pseudonym, but it was the ultimate confirmation of publication and a great education in novel-writing. I even wrote one erotica novel in the second person, several from first person female POVs – with each novel I attempted a different approach to narration.
Then my editor at Virgin, James Marriott, showed one of my horror stories to John Couthard, who recommended me to Ramsey Campbell. Ramsey was putting together a collection called Gathering The Bones and took my story, Mother’s Milk. I was amazed. My first publication under my actual name and the rite-of-passage horror story that I wrote at the end of my masters in St Andrews. Being a cheeky blighter I then asked Ramsey in 2003 for advice with the novel Banquet for the Damned, which I had revisited and rewritten again in 2002, and Ramsey recommended me to Peter Crowther at PS. I was unaware of small presses at the time, but Peter read and accepted Banquet within a week. Without Ramsey and Peter, Banquet would have remained an uneaten meal, mouldering in the pantry of my hard drive. Peter then championed the book for years and it started to develop a modest reputation among other writers and critics who said some very kind things. Had it been the eighties, the story may have been different, but I’d written a big supernatural horror novel in a publishing climate that had no interest in horror. I was bloody lucky to find a sympathetic writer of considerable reputation, and a sympathetic publisher in Peter Crowther. They brought me into print as a writer of supernatural horror.
JD’L: Having been through all this yourself, it must have been tough notifying your Virgin Horror authors that the imprint had reached the end of the road. Was the imprint doomed from the word go or do you think, if certain things had been different, the line might still be going?
ALGN: We’d been taken over by a big international corporate publisher in 2007, but were still working under the existing Virgin management and I was asked to create new fiction lines. I immediately put horror forward as one idea. Everyone was excited, we had big plans, the critical path was set, so it certainly wasn’t doomed from the get go. On the contrary. But during the first year in 2008, despite how promising the line was, the company’s strategy began moving in a non-fiction direction. New management, new staff, more changes, new focuses, and I was kind of left alone in fiction on the sidelines, but without any real resources to publish the 2009 list. Then cutbacks and title-count reductions hit with the recession, people started losing their jobs etc. Fiction was wound right back to the erotica I had been editing since 2005, plus the cult fiction reprints I was producing for Bukowski. The editorial strategy had moved almost exclusively to non-fiction, leaving horror, erotica and me, high and dry. But the list was acclaimed, it was successful at the level it was published, and may well have continued at a better level had the company’s publishing strategy not changed. So it was deeply disappointing having to tell the authors of the end after such an exciting start. Nine months later I was delivering the same message to a hundred erotica authors too. Again, not something I chose to do nor enjoyed doing. Considering the re-emergence of horror – one of the only good pieces of news in fiction publishing these days – it now looks horribly premature to have buried us thus and so quickly. Ironically, The Birthing House was the first book I tried to buy for the list and that went on to sell 150K copies for Sphere, who published it so well. I’d even say, we were ahead of our time. As I said to the authors too, we may not have swung wide the gates of hell, but we certainly took the catch of the porch door. Having Bloody Books up and dancing at the same time as the Virgin horror line, it was an exciting time to see the underground – the punks – looking to the mainstream again. We raised consciousness and published some fine books. Can’t believe I got Thomas Ligotti into Smiths Travel too – I mark that as an editorial achievement. And if you look at the breadth and quality on those two horror lists, in an age of mediocre thrillers, predictable post-colonial literary fiction, ghost-written celeb fiction, and Vatican conspiracy nonsense, I think we can hold our grizzled, lipless and mottled heads up high.
JD’L: It’s been my experience of publishing that you never know what’s round the next corner. Your personal story seems to fit with this. After all you’ve put up with, suddenly there’s some real sunshine brightening the next part of your writing journey. A two book deal, no less! How did it come about and what was your reaction?
ALGN: To quote Chevy Chase in Caddyshack, “Cinderella Story, boy from nowhere.” When my agent John Jarrold called me to tell me the results of the auction, as I held the phone, my hand shook. Pretty much waited my entire life as a writer for an opportunity like this. I started writing seriously, with it being the major focus of my every day, and as a purpose for life, in 1995. So after fifteen years, I do feel like I have spent a long time in an apprenticeship.
I finished my second novel of supernatural horror at Xmas – another ambitious three year epic, this time written around a very busy fulltime job in publishing. One publisher expressed firm interest in late May of this year, then another and another … And John set an auction date. The very word “auction” in relation to me is hard to even say, and the enthusiasm from the editors was overwhelming. And that’s not false modesty. I vividly remember 40 plus rejections to my introductory letter for Banquet in 2000. They took two years to come in, and by the time the final one had landed on the mat, my head was down. Having worked in publishing I also know how hard it is for editors to pitch and get enough positive feedback from sales, publicity, export, rights, marketing, and management about a proposal. But my second book seemed to generate that at the appropriate levels, and as I’m 50K words into the first draft of a third novel, we submitted a partial of that too. So it became a two-book deal.
JD’L: Any chance of a whisper of what your next novels are about?
ALGN: The second novel is haunted building story spanning generations, my London novel; the third a ‘great outdoors’ novel of psychic terror.
JD’L: Time for the awards ceremony, Adam…
You have honour of making two nominations. First is the Sword of the Ultimate Darkness which goes to the work of horror in any medium which, in your opinion, is a timeless classic.
Second, you may banish to the Plague Pits the worst example of our beloved genre in any medium.
Please make your nominations.
ALGN: I consider this a real honour. For the Sword of Ultimate Darkness, I’d like to mention a book that may have slipped under the radar for many, but it’s a magnificent second horror novel by an American writer called David Searcy, whom I know almost nothing about, but the book needs its profile raised and I treasure it. I found it in a bookshop in New York in 2004. The cover caught my eye. I read the back, checked the first few pages and bought it. It’s one of those books that both made me want to write and also to give up writing because it is so good. It’s a terrific amalgam of M R James and William Faulkner, of Daniel Woodrell and Algernon Blackwood. American noir, scarecrow horror. I read it in one sitting in Hyde Park under a tree, and found myself glancing over my shoulder as the end drew near. It’s called Last Things by David Searcy.
The Plague Pits are overflowing, but I’d like to cast the remake of The Haunting, starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones, into the pit, along with the entire cast and crew for taking part in such a sham, plus the studio that probably ruined what was originally an honest endeavour. If anyone else was unlucky enough to pay to see this film, they’ll know why it belongs at the bottom of the pit.
JD’L: Lovely choices!
It only remains for me to say a heartfelt thanks on behalf of all at Horror Reanimated for joining us here in the rotting colon of purgatory. And to apologise for the smell, of course. We wish you the very best of luck for all your future projects.
It was a pleasure, thanks very much for the kind words and for having me. And also for giving me an opportunity to leave the indistinct bone-thing, that has been following me, with you. The runes are cast…
August 17th, 2009
Previous Posts
A well-intentioned supernatural covert-ops thriller from the writer of The Blair Witch Project that may culminate in frustration for some, as the ending is speculative to say the least. On the other hand, there are those of us who appreciate such room for interpretation, and The Objective cannot be accused of being anything but original given the recent trend towards inept war/horror movies such as the tedious Red Sands and the atrocious Zombies of War.
What is clear is the formula Myrick has chosen to apply to The Objective: this is The Blair Witch Project without trees (and witches). He develops a gradual unease as the lost group stumble across wooden triangles stuck in the barren landscape, possibly placed as warnings. Water turns to dust in their canteens and they see vague shimmering shapes in the distance, hazy figures walking into the triangular phenomena before ascending into the sky. As they are picked off one-by-one by a rarely seen force that literally disintegrates its victims (its geometries looking like something that might have come from a mind-meld of pseudo-scientist and new-age sf maverick Eric Von Daniken, and H.P.Lovecraft) the team is no nearer knowing what it is supposed to be doing.