I’m Hate-Watching THE STRAIN

Posted on July 24th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

I am hate-watching, absolutely hate-watching, THE STRAIN, based on novels I enjoyed, a TV series about a plague of vampires with projectile stinger-tongues loose in Manhattan, where literally thousands of people are being murdered or transformed by their rampage on a nightly basis, where the problem is getting worse by literally orders of magnitude on a nightly basis, and which somehow, somehow, manages to drain this situation of all sense of urgency.

The books can be attacked on the same plot points, but they move like action movies, but the TV series keeps pulling back, giving everybody reason to calmly and quietly discuss what’s going on. At a point where the remaining government of Manhattan is reduced to mildly bickering over what they now know to be a vampire plague, the opening of a food distribution center for the citizens who still remain is occasion for a ribbon-cutting and a speech about as stirring as the one Heywood Floyd gives the scientific team investigating the monolith in 2001.

A new character, a young female playwright, is introduced because the evil industrialist is taken by her and hires her to be his publicist, “a great opportunity” in a city where everybody really should be evacuating by the bridges as soon as the sun comes up. She doesn’t behave like she’s under any stress at all. I react more to an oil spill on the other side of the world. Her reaction is more on the level of, “Cool, I have a job.”

Another pair of characters blow up a locker room filled with vampires and celebrate by flirting in a swimming pool. Well, that’s nice for them.

The premise that tension is supposed to build and never let up, except for those occasions where it can be enhanced by brief intervals of calm, is lost. Manhattan, and by extension the world, is under assault by a plague of white worms that turn human beings into disgusting, mindless, phosphorus-shitting, stinger-tongued vampires…and somehow, it’s just “a problem,” generating about as much suspense, outside its occasional impressive setpieces, as a transit strike.

Tags: Hate, horror, Television, THE STRAIN | Category Horror, TV

IT FOLLOWS (2015)

Posted on July 22nd, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Last night’s terrific recent horror movie on Netflix Disk: IT FOLLOWS (2015), one of a flurry of recent horror indies that astonishes by being original, human, and wholly persuasive within its universe. Posits a demon — or *something*; that word is never used — that is passed from person to person by sexual contact. If you are the most recent afflicted person, the creature will stalk you in the guise of a human being, never moving faster than a slow walk. Only you can see it, but it can attack anybody who tries to help you. Because it can change its appearance (though its usually creepy), you cannot recognize it on sight; any slow-moving person is suspect. When it reaches you it will beat you to death.

Protagonist: a college-age girl who makes love to a boy she’s sweet on only to find out that he’s passed on the infection. He proves its existence to her, warns her that she needs to pass it on as quickly as possible, tells her that if whoever she passes it on to dies it will work its way back to her, and so on.

Three things distinguish this film. First, unlike many horror films where the real-life aspects are neglected, this girl’s life and her circle of friends feel genuine; they are not “types,” and are well-characterized both before and after the menace turns up. Second, this film completely subverts the slow-walking stalker trope; yes, it is very possible to outrun it, or to get in a car and drive like hell, but it also never stops, and distances offer only minimal protection, and the constant terror and uncertainty will wear you down.

Third, and I appreciated this most, our heroine’s friends are skeptical but persuaded that she’s telling the truth the instant undeniable physical evidence establishes that *some* invisible being is coming after her. There are several small-scale set pieces throughout, involving the confrontations, and they’re all well-done, but EVEN BETTER is the portrait of what this does to her psychologically, while they’re waiting for its next attack. It’s a story that works despite its silly premise because it is told with absolute conviction.

This has been an astonishing couple of years for small horror films; we sometimes go years without a halfway decent once, and just recently we have had IT FOLLOWS, HOUSEBOUND, HONEYMOON, THE BABADOOK, PROXY a bunch of others, all told with cleverness and economy, all about more than just getting us to the next fright scene. Who woulda thunk that these movies would possibly evolve in the direction of getting smarter, to combat the trend toward idiocy in movies with budgets?

Tags: Honeymoon, horror, Housebound, It Follows, Proxy, The Babadook | Category Movies

That Sledge-Hammer was Always Meant To Hit There: A Hugo Theory

Posted on July 18th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

So: conspiracy theory.

Take this with all the weight you take all conspiracy theories: i.e., practically none, given that it’s all supposition, and simply seems to fit one perspective on the facts. Don’t be fooled just because it happens to hinge on the doings of an actual, existing conspiracy; the conspiracy’s real, but their precise strategy and motives (as opposed to their stated strategy and motives) remain hypothetical to those of us outside it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t spitball.

So: Sad / Rabid Puppies.

The one I call {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} has announced that he’s voted NO AWARD in all categories, including the one where he has a nominee, in part, he says, to make some point about the Hugos being invalid.

John Scalzi has recently tweeted to the effect that this claim has now becoming fashionable among the Puppies. I don’t know. {MMM} is the only one I’ve seen say it, but there may be more.

Let us assume, the operative word being “assume” and the open admission being that it is as trustworthy as any assumption, that Scalzi’s claim is accurate and that a number of the conspirators have indeed voted “NO AWARD” even for their own stories on a ballot they previously did their level best to capture whole.

Given that they have previously said that a No Award in any category is proof that the Hugos have been hijacked by a conspiracy of SJWS and that writers of good-old-fashioned traditional science fiction without imbedded leftist messages cannot get a break, given that they’ve tried so hard to get to this point, why would they do this now? Why would they fly so close to the sun, on borrowed wings, before pulling the feathers out and plunging back to the earth, like Icarus?

This is my theory.

It may not be at all accurate. Again, I do not present this as verifiable fact. But this is what I think and this is what I hope.

They’ve done the math.

They know how many Supporting Memberships Sasquan has picked up since this mess began. And while we have been stuck saying we don’t know how many of those supporting memberships are voters they or their allies have subsidized – quite a few, possibly, given how their allies include the Breitbart organization – and how many have been fans outraged by their tactics who have bought supporting memberships just to vote them down in every possible category, they DO know how many memberships they’ve bought; they do know how many memberships they’ve paid for, and they do know that after all their rants and fulminations and promises to smash the Hugos, they know that the numbers suggest that backlash numerically superior. They have begun to realize that they’re in for a drubbing of historical proportions. NO AWARD in any category dominated by their candidates. Hugos going to the stories and candidates they had nothing to do with.

And faced with this fear (it cannot be a certainty), they have taken the bold pre-emptive public relations step of repositioning that possible result as a victory.

So {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} has said that he’s voting NO AWARD in every category, even ahead of his own story, thus altering the presumed goal of all this unpleasantness from making sure Hugo nominations and Hugo trophies only go to real nuts-and-bolts science fiction for the only science fiction readers who count, to sabotaging the awards completely, making sure nobody gets any, and in that way proving that scorched Earth was always the only option.

This is, of course, if Scalzi is right and anybody other than {Moronic Massacre-Mocker} has said it.

So far I’ve only seen the rant from {Moronic Massacre-Mocker}, who is being given a time-out from Facebook for hate speech.

But if we permit consideration of the possibility that it has become a meme, it represents a serious shift in strategy and a complete rebranding of the desired goal.

We wanted the ship to sink. We always wanted to make a point about icebergs.

We wanted our village to be sacked. It proves our moral superiority to the huns.

Yes, I just slammed myself in the balls with a sledgehammer. I meant to do that.

Maybe they know how many supporting memberships they paid for and how many they did not. Maybe they’ve convened in panic and discussed how to still pull a nominal victory out of all this. Maybe they’ve said, “We have to sell the premise that if we go down in flames, it’s what we always intended.”

Maybe they’re terrified.

This is just a conspiracy theory, mind you. It might or might not have any validity. But the shift from, “VOTING NO AWARD IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!” to “WE ARE NOW VOTING NO AWARD EVEN IN OUR OWN CATEGORIES!” does give me pause….

Tags: Hugos, John Scalzi, Moronic Massacre-Mocker, sad puppies, Science Fiction | Category Books, Commentary, Science Fiction, Writing