Aren't those just fantastic? I'm telling ya, vintage film featurettes and production materials are my drug, and I'm currently mainlining my way through The Towering Inferno Blu-ray. I also just procured a copy of Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson's novel, The Glass Inferno, which when combined with Richard Martin Stern's The Tower (which I had already read) served as the basis for Irwin Allen's disaster movie to end all disaster movies.
Combine all of that and, sure enough, we're currently in the natal stages for one of those patented, indulgently self-reflective, long-winded and overly researched kitchen-sink reviews that pop up around here on occasion. So, stay tuned, Boils and Ghouls, it's about to get pretty hot around here. (And what is the flash-point of polyester and taffeta anyways?)
John W. Campbell’s seminal science fiction novella, "Who Goes There?", first saw the ink of print in the August, 1938, issue of Astounding Science-Fiction magazine under the veil of Don A. Stuart, one of his many pseudonyms, and a favorite when writing something this morbid and gruesome. And over the multiple decades since publication this tale of an Antarctic expedition uncovering a deadly shape-shifting alien in the glacial ice, which thaws and starts assimilating its way to world conquest has been adapted to the big and small screens on numerous occasions both officially and unofficially.
From Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951) to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), and from Doctor Who ("Seeds of Doom") to The X-Files ("Ice"), and from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978) to The Stepford Wives (1975), all owe a debt to Campbell’s masterpiece of mounting paranoia and nebulous, nigh-undetectable monster.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading the story yet, you can rectify that here, and then you’ll really get a true sense of what I’m talking about. But its influence goes well beyond the moving pictures. I dug out this fabulous, though extremely truncated, British radio adaption put on by the BBC in 2002 while trying to extricate myself from one of them there YouTube holes.
Further digging found a four-color adaptation published in 1976 in the debut issue Starstream, by Arnold Drake with art by Jack Abel. And you can check that out here.
Turns out Campbell’s alien, referred to from the very beginning as The Thing, is also featured in Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials.
And in 2010, author Peter Watts published an interesting twist on this macabre sci-fi tale, spinning it around and telling the story from the alien’s point of view in "The Things", though to be fair, it is told more from Carpenter’s film version point of view instead of Campbell's novella. You can read Watt's version here, or there’s an audio version of it here.
But the most interesting nugget I found on this latest cannonball into The Thing gene pool, is how it influenced another author, whose work would prove just as, if not more, influential than Campbell’s novella. Apparently, A.E. van Vogt had given up on science fiction and was making his living writing sudsy “true confession” melodramas when he passed a newsstand and, by chance, started thumbing through a certain copy of Astounding Science-Fiction. "I read half of it standing there at the news-stand before I bought the issue and finished it,” said van Vogt. “That brought me back into the fold with a vengeance. I still regard 'Who Goes There?' as the best story Campbell ever wrote, and the best horror tale in science fiction."
After this chance encounter, van Vogt wrote his own story about a shape-shifting alien and submitted it to Campbell, who was also serving as senior editor at Astounding Science Fiction at the time, but he rejected “Vault of the Beast”. However, he did see enough there that he encouraged the author to take another run at it, which netted us all "The Black Destroyer", and whose success spawned "Discord in Scarlet" and several other salty sci-fi tales, later collected under one banner as The Voyage of the Space Beagle (also as Mission: Interplanetary), whose influence, Nexialism, monsters, and cosmic whiz-bangery, can be seen in the DNA of everything from Star Trek to Alien. So, in a sense, two of the greatest sci-fi monsters, The Thing and the Xenomorph (which is directly inspired by both vanVogt’s Coeurl and the Ixtl) and two of the scariest horror films ever made, The Thing (1982) and Alien (1979) can be traced directly to one story. Because this...
Plus this...
Definitely equals this in my book:
Sadly, "Who Goes There?" would essentially be the last thing Campbell would write, focusing instead on his editorial duties and screening potential authors, giving the green-light not only to van Vogt, but to the likes of Lester del Rey, Robert Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon to name but a few. And even though he was no longer writing, his influence was far from over. "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man", said Campbell as he started his sci-fi revolution. As to what that revolution consisted of, I think fellow author and friend Isaac Asimov summed up Campbell's impact best:
"By his own example and by his instruction and by his undeviating and persisting insistence, he forced first Astounding and then all science fiction into his mold," said Asimov. "He abandoned the earlier orientation of the field. He demolished the stock characters who had filled it; eradicated the penny-dreadful plots; extirpated the Sunday-supplement science. In a phrase, he blotted out the purple of pulp. Instead, he demanded that science-fiction writers understand science and understand people, a hard requirement that many of the established writers of the 1930s could not meet. Campbell did not compromise because of that: those who could not meet his requirements could not sell to him, and the carnage was as great as it had been in Hollywood a decade before, while silent movies had given way to the talkies."
Even as his influence dwindled in the 1960s with the coming of the New Wave, Campbell continued to work as an editor until his death in 1971. And even though he made his Golden Age of Science Fiction more about the science than the fiction (-- a stickling for detail that got him into trouble with the FBI when the editor commissioned one of his authors to write about the construction of an atomic bomb in 1944), Campbell wasn't above asking for a story that would match a cover painting he'd already bought. A bona fide genius to some, an irascible right-wing contrarian to others, and a complete cuckoo-bird to the rest, the answer is John W. Campbell was all of the above and I contend that no one did more for the legitimization of the genre than he and him.
About four years ago I wrote about a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a proposed bio-docudrama on Art Nelson, the total creep behind The Creeping Terror (1962), a film where a shambling carpet sample galumps around and slurps up several dudes and damsels, lingering and leering on the lady tushes as they get stuck in the creature's gaping maw. Two years later they managed to raise enough to get it done, and then The Creep Behind the Camera (2014) spent two more years on the festival circuit, but now, finally, it's available to stream to the masses on Amazon Prime.
Now, the cinematic tale of this con-man, grifter and complete whack-job, Nelson, under the name Vic Savage, is both funny and loathsome as director / writer Pete Schuermann pokes a stick into this noxious human cowpie, who apparently ran a prostitution ring out of his house, fleeced wannabe actresses for money and sexual favors, and abused his multiple layers of wives and children to advance his apocalyptic cinematic dreams. A dream that sort of came to fruition with the realization of one of the most gonzoidal monster movies ever made.
Told through first hand testimonials of those who survived both Nelson and the making of the film, dramatic recreations, and footage from The Creeping Terror itself, the film positively excels when focusing on the spit and bailing-wire of making a monster movie, revealing all kinds of mind-boggling behind the scenes shenanigans, including a high school band powered soundtrack, how it was shot on the Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson provided all the (most probably stolen) cars for the film, and a running fight between Nelson and monster-maker Jon Lacky over unpaid bills, who kept stealing the creature costume from each other as the production was drawn out over nearly two years as financing kept running out. It also finally answers why the majority of the film is nothing but nonsensical narration that has nothing to do with sound equipment falling into a boy of water.
The rest of the film, focusing on Nelson's horrific personal life -- he was a convicted felon, a certified abuser and sexual sadist, probably could've spent another week in editing to shore it up just a bit more as the finished film feels too long (clocking in at nearly 2 hours), and yet not long enough. Yeah. The Creep Behind the Camera feels fairly immersive but gets too repetitive in spots and leaves several surfaces barely scratched with many raised questions and side vignettes left unanswered and unresolved -- namely the hints that Nelson filmed pornographic material with his own children for the raincoat crowd to compensate for the ill-gotten budget money he wasted on drugs, booze, and hookers.
Again, the stuff on making the movie is both fascinating and hilarious (especially the Charles Manson connection), but the look into Nelson's personal life as he schemes and screws his way through Hollywood is just sleazy and revolting and hard to watch. A more pathetic person you will be hard-pressed to unearth. (And if you ever do, please lower the rock and run. Run fast.) Despite the subject matter the film itself is very well-crafted. Thus, entertaining probably isn't the right word when considering the subject matter but The Creep Behind the Camera does make for one fine cautionary tale.
The Creep Behind the Camera (2014) Slithering Carpets / EP: Aaron DePry, Nancy Theken / P: Brian McCulley, Kyle Woodiel, Kevin J. Beechwood, Jeremy Lengele, Robert von Dassanowsky / AP: Robert C. Cage III, Marilyn Freeman, Ryun Hovind, Jeremy Lengele / D: Pete Schuermann / W: Pete Schuermann / C: Jeff Pointer / E: Dave Wruck / M: John Schuermann / S: Josh Phillips, Jodi Lynn Thomas, Bill LeVasseur, Kyle Amann, William Thourlby, Lois Wiseman, Allan Silliphant
In the small city of Ararat, Australia, the Palmer family, father Russell (Pledger), mother June (Traynor), and son Matthew (Sharpe), several months after the fact, are still reeling from the accidental drowning death of daughter Alice (Zucker), made worse by numerous nocturnal visits and sightings of the girl caught on film after she died. With this evidence, thinking she might still be alive, the mother, lost in a spiral of denial, pushes to have Alice’s body exhumed to settle if it was really her body recovered from the lake. When the DNA tests prove positive, the only other explanation for the photos and video, then, has to be supernatural, causing the Palmers to turn to a renowned medium (Jodrell) for some answers to these ghostly phenomenon, which also draws the attention of a documentary film crew; and together, through several harrowing twist and turns, this slick after-action report unearths long buried family secrets and skeletons as the harrowing (and unsettling) truth about Alice finally comes out…
Video courtesy of Lake Mungo.
Though purported as such, Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008) really isn’t a found footage fright flick in the vein of Paranormal Activity (2007) or The Blair Witch Project (1999) – to its betterment, as far as I’m concerned.
No, despite the horribly misleading promotional art for its DVD release and being lumped into Lionsgate’s annual, and more visceral, 8 Films to Die For After Dark Horrorfest line-up, what we have here is film presented as a faux news documentary about a girl who tragically drowned and her family’s struggle through the grieving process that is hamstrung by an apparent haunting by the deceased, made manifest by spectral visitations and apparitions of the girl showing up on several photos and videos of family, friends and complete strangers.
Thus, Lake Mungo is a haunting film about haunting things. And it’s not what you think or were led to believe as the film unfolds, rather brilliantly, unveiling all kinds of details and secrets that no one knew about through bread-crumbs both real and unreal (-- most notably unraveling a very elaborate hoax and a skeevy sex-tape involving the underage victim and some scurvo neighbors she was babysitting for).
Writer and director Anderson wrote the film in 2005, penning something that could be shot on a lower budget when he couldn’t raise enough funds for another script with a larger budget demand. (The majority of the film was eventually funded by a grant from the Australian government.) According to Anderson, he did not set out to make a supernatural thriller but rather an exploration of grief and how technology is used to track memories, and how these recorded memories mediate a lot of our experiences. For the cast, Anderson wanted a group of unknowns to maintain the documentary illusion. And to add another layer of verisimilitude, all of the dialogue was improvised to follow the outline of the story, with Anderson serving as the off-screen interviewer during the testimonials.
The cast is uniformly solid and plugged into a well-layered pastiche of film, (fake) news footage, video, and photo montage that leaves the audience struggling to remember that they’re actually just watching a movie. I’m telling ya, Lake Mungo gave me a HUGE case of the drizzles as these elements played out. But fair warning; this film is not about spring-loaded things jumping out at you or CGI creepy-crawlies but startling images coming into focus in the background or the opposite corners from where you’re supposed to be looking; and the one and only real “BOOGA-BOOGA!” moment in the whole film, when we see the footage on Alice’s recovered camera, is startling effective. And be sure to stick through the closing credits as the “filmmakers” go through some of the footage one last time to show you what we missed.
Less about a haunting and spectral revenge from beyond the grave, then, and more about dire premonitions coming full circle and a tragedy that no one saw coming except, apparently, for the victim, Lake Mungo isn’t very scary but it is very creepy; very, very creepy; and a very slow creep at that. And when the whole thing comes full circle, in the end, you might just find something in your eye.
Lake Mungo (2008) Mungo Productions :: Screen Australia :: SBS Independent :: After Dark Films / EP: William Coleman, Gilbert George, Robert George / P: Georgie Nevile, David Rapsey / AP: Joel Anderson, John Brawley / D: Joel Anderson / W: Joel Anderson / C: John Brawley / E: Bill Murphy / M: David Paterson / S: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe, Talia Zucker, Steve Jodrell
