Masters of Horror: Episode 15 Family

I don't usually do sitcoms, so I've never seen a single episode of Cheers. That said, however, being introduced to George Wendt by Family made me want to seek out a few episodes. I don't know his role on that show, but here's he's a great villain. It's not clear if he's evil or simply mentally ill, but either way you find yourself liking him and feeling sad for his situation.

Wendt plays a serial killer named Harold. While we don't get his full back story, it's strongly implied that he was abused as a child. As a result, he desperately wants a family, so he kills people who fit the idyllic look he imagines, removes all their skin, and dresses them up in a Norman Bates-esque manner. The influence of Psycho is clearly here, but Harold comes across as quite different from Norman, somehow more aware of his mental illness and in turn more dangerous.

Harold's family is finally complete, with a wife, daughter, and both grandparents. Then, a monkey wrench is thrown into the plans: Celia and David (Meredith Monroe and Matt Keesler), a new couple, move in next-door, and Harold becomes obsessed with Celia.

This is the point at which we run into some ambiguities regarding Harold's condition. We see that he hallucinates his skeletons as living humans who interact with him, and he also imagines Celia making sexual advances on him right in front of her husband. On the other hand, Harold clearly knows that he has to take steps to cover up his murders, with his “wife” (Frances Flanigan) even advising him that Celia is “too close to home.” So, I'm not entirely sure whether Harold is fully responsible for his own actions.

He eventually “kills” his wife, smashing her skeleton. It's implied that this is a repeated occurrence, with Harold destroying old family members when he becomes obsessed with new people. While he only references one previous wife, we see two new victims and an attempt before he goes after Celia, so either he's been through dozens, or his killing is really starting to take off.

Celia and David, meanwhile, are having a fight over whether or not to have a second child after the loss of their daughter. Eventually, David leaves, and Harold lures Celia over for dinner. Just before he can finish her, though, David ambushes him. As it turns out David and Celia were the real parents of his daughter, who tracked him down so they can torture and kill him. David, being a doctor, intends to keep him alive for as long as possible.

The thing that's amazing in the relationship between these three people is that all are fundamentally evil, and yet still friendly and likable. Even if we excuse the vigilante justice, David and Celia seem to treat Harold's murder as a sick sexual turn-on, planning to have a second child once they've eliminated the man who killed their first.

I don't think anything in this episode really scared me, except perhaps the ending. The idea of being tortured by someone with such an extensive knowledge of human biology is pretty sickening to me. Otherwise, I viewed the episode more as a black comedy, but a very good one. I imagine that someone within the demographics Harold targeted might be more frightened by it (I'm too old to be his child, too young to be his grandpa, and he shows no interest in a same-sex marriage). Even then, George Wendt is just hard to not like.

Masters of Horror: Episode 14 The Damned Thing

The Damned Thing is based on an old short-story by Ambrose Bierce. I've never read that story, and aside from the obvious updates I have no idea how closely this episode adheres to the original story. I bring up the original short-story only to save myself from comments left by readers who felt the need to share this information, under the impression that I didn't know.

This is an episode that gets worse in the re-watching. The first time through the creature seemed mysterious. But, watching it again, with an idea of how it ends, I just found it confusing. The creature was an oil monster that came to kill the descendants of the man who started an oil field in the 1930s. It can apparently attack as an invisible but corporeal force, cause people to kill themselves, cause people to kill each other, or just show up as oil and eat people. Why it needs such variety I don't understand. I'm also rather confused by why it's target seems to be the last person it attacks, plowing through the most of the town first.

The main character, Sheriff Kevin Reddle (Sean Patrick Flannery), is an excellent protagonist. It's like the episode got the hard part right, giving us an interesting protagonist, but screwed up the “scary monster chasing the hero” part. When he was a child his father killed his mother, and chased Kevin with a gun, before being killed by something the locals calls The Damned Thing. Now, Kevin is constantly paranoid, but still feels a need for a connection to the family he lost. So, he lives in his parents' home, but has rigged it up with extensive surveillance. He also dreads his own coming fortieth birthday, and the local priest (Ted Raimi) advises him to come in for confession. His paranoia eventually drove his wife Dina (Marisa Coughlan) to take their son Mikey (Alex Ferris) to live in a trailer instead.

Of course, The Damned Thing reappears with his birthday, and people in the town become both suicidal and homicidal overnight, and Kevin becomes increasingly violent. The Priest, interestingly, becomes violent in general, but also gains a determination to wipe out Kevin's bloodline to end the curse. While I'm not totally clear why some attackers seems incoherent, and others can focus their rage, I think it's effective enough to get me to suspend my disbelief. I'd say a bit too much of the havoc takes place off-screen, but what we get is decent enough.

The ending of the episode left me scratching my head, though. I have no idea if The Damned Thing wants to drag out the torment of Kevin's family, or is just doing whatever it feels like at the moment. Kevin's death has very little parallel with his father's. Kevin's father was attacked by The Damned Thing as an invisible force, Kevin is eaten by the aforementioned oil monster. Furthermore, the father's death marked the end of The Damned Thing's attack until Kevin's fortieth birthday. It's implied, however, that The Damned Thing killed Mikey and Dina immediately after Kevin. Bookends with a more clear parallel would have been far more effective here. Or at least give us a reason for the Damned Thing to want to end the bloodline now

I'm not going to say I hated this episode, but it's among the weakest of the series. It's certainly not fit to be the season premiere. It lacks the punch of Tobe Hooper's usual work, and feels more like a cut-rate Mick Garris/Stephen King miniseries slashed down to an hour, and without King's writing talent.

Masters of Horror: Episode 13 Imprint

This isn't an easy episode to review. Somewhat infamously, Imprint was not aired on Showtime, but instead went straight-to-DVD. Officially the content was considered too shocking, but there is some speculation that it was pulled as a marketing ploy. Certainly I can see the appeal of being able to label the DVD as “too shocking for Showtime!”

This is still a shocking episode, either way. But, some of my concerns with it are not simply the shock itself. I think every critic is at some point confronted with a movie that he or she finds objectionable on some deeper moral level. I remember Roger Ebert's review of Wolf Creek as a great example of that. He saw the movie as well-made, but thoroughly unpleasant to sit through. He said that “there is a line, and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's well North of Wolf Creek.”

In this case my issues are more straight forward: This is an episode that clearly tries to portray the horrors of human trafficking, while simultaneously using sexy Asian women as the victims. The use of shibari and erotic needlework as a form of torture further eroticizes the episode. I'm usually reluctant to say that a work of fiction glorifies sexual violence, but if there's ever been a work which I found difficult to defend from such criticisms, it's this episode.

Both seasons of Masters of Horror included an episode by a Japanese horror director. In this case it's Takashi Miike, director of Audition. With that film I had a great deal of trouble analyzing the story because I lacked the cultural context to tell whether the main character was supposed to be likable, or a sexist pig who got his comeuppance. Here, however, it's clear that Miike is telling a story intended for an American audience.

The episode takes place in the 19^th century, and deals with an American journalist named Christopher (Billy Drago) who comes to a brothel located on a small island. He is looking for his lost love, Komomo (an actress credited as the single name Michié). He's told that's she's not on the island, but that he'll have to stay the night and catch the boat back in the morning. While he's uninterested in sex, he sees a woman with a deformed face (Youki Kudoh) being abused by the Madame, and asks to take her to his room for the night simply to help her.

The woman, whose name is never given, tells Christopher that Komomo was on the island, but hanged herself when she believed her love wasn't coming. The woman also tells Christopher the story of her own childhood, and how she ended up trafficked by her mother, a mid-wife, after her father died.

Christopher suspects the woman is lying, and gradually goads more and more information out of her. With each retelling Komomo's fate becomes more and more horrific. In the second telling Komomo killed herself after having been tortured when she was accused of stealing the Madame's jade ring. The final retelling reveals that the woman had stolen the ring herself, framed Komomo, and then hanged her to make it look like suicide.

The plot then takes an even more bizarre twist, as the woman reveals that she has a parasitic twin concealed on her head (the effect has to be seen to be believed) who wanted the ring. The woman's mother was not a midwife, but an abortionist, who married her abusive brother. The woman was molested by a Buddhist priest, who instilled an intense fear of Hell in her. She believed herself to be evil, and by extension believed that anyone who was friends with her would go to hell with her, but by betraying Komomo and severing their friendship, she could assure Komomo's ascent into heaven.

Putting my objections to the episode aside, it's definitely disturbing. We get to watch as the onion is peeled back, showing us more and more just how deep the tragedy goes. The ending, however, still leaves us with many troubling questions.

Christopher is something of a decoy. We expect the white male to be our protagonist. While the episode does eventually end on him in prison, having killed the woman, this isn't really his story. We get only hints of his backstory. He's there only to be our surrogate, to give the woman someone to tell her life story to.

In a simple yeah or nay, I give this episode another yeah. It's certainly thrilling, and could easily be expanded into a full-length movie. Yes, I have some objections to it, but the bottom line is that it does it's job.

Masters of Horror: Episode 12 Haeckel's Tale

Haeckel's Tale didn't stick out in my mind on my first viewing of this series some years ago. Since then, my tastes have changed a great deal, and looking at it now I find it to be nearly as good as Cigarette Burns. It's directed by John McNaughton, whose Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer I have yet to see, but which I've been meaning to check out for some time.

Just as significantly, it's based on a story by Clive Barker, a Master if ever there was one. I haven't read the original story, but Clive's fingerprints are evident here. Perverted sex is mixed with cosmic horror, as people seek out forbidden pleasures.

The episode is presented as a frame story, with a young man (Steve Bacic) visiting an old witch (Micki Maunsell) to beg for his recently deceased wife to be raised from the dead. The witch tells him that if he listens to the story of Ernst Haeckel (Derek Cecil), and still wishes it, she will agree to bring his wife back.

The story she tells is hinted to take place in the same universe as Frankenstein, and I find the episode to be a thematic inversion. In the original Frankenstein novel Frankenstein was inspired by mysticism, but ultimately found the secrets to reviving the dead in science. Haeckel, on the other hand, is an atheist medical student with the same obsession, but seeking to use science, who eventually discovers that the mysticism he initially rejected was very real.

Haeckel fails in his experiments to restore life to the dead, but hears of a necromancer named Montesquino (Jon Polito). Out of morbid curiosity, Haeckel travels to see Montesquino's show, and watches what he believes to be a scam play out. He fakes interest in learning Montesquino's secrets in an effort to get the man to confess, but is blown off.

Montesquino is an interesting character. I'm not entirely sure the extent to which he's on the level. Yes, he can revive the dead, but he still comes across as quite shady. He claims that every dead person he revives takes a year off his life, but later seems to revive several people for a task that only requires one. He also fails to mention that his revivals only last until sunrise, and the people return as zombies, since he has no means of restoring the soul. I'm also unsure if he actually revived a dog in his show, or just used puppetry just because it was easier.

Haeckel then receives a letter telling him that his father is on the edge of death, and he immediately sets off to see him. When he attempts to sleep next to a cemetery, he's approached by an old man named Wolfram (Tom McBeath), who offers him a place to stay for the night. Wolfram shows very little concern at Haeckel's obvious attraction to his wife Elise (Leela Savasta), who spends the night acting very distracted.

When Montesquino comes in the night and takes Elise away to the cemetery, Haeckel convinces himself that he's fleecing the poor couple. Elise's first husband is dead, and Haeckel determines that Wolfram has paid the necromancer to revive her husband to sexually satisfy Elise. Naturally, Haeckel still believes that Montesquino is a con man, so he assumes the necromancer was doing the job personally. So, Haeckel pursues the to the cemetary, as Wolfram follows him and tries to stop him.

To Haeckel's shock, they walk in on Elise surrounded by zombies, being pleasured by her zombified husband, just as advertised. Haeckel, in a rage, kills Montesquino, while Wolfram is eaten by the zombies. While dying Montesquino reveals to Haeckel that the spell cannot be stopped, he will just have to wait until morning and let it play out.

It's been said of Barker that he re-invented Cosmic Horror, independently of influence from Lovecraft. I find it unlikely that he wasn't at least familiar with Lovecraftian horror, but his concept of a Cosmic Horror Story is quite different. Lovecraft dealt in vague, indefinable concepts. Barker typically deals with human experiences, sexuality especially, distorted in ways that are deeply disturbing. Haeckel believes himself to be above Victorian understandings of good and evil, but upon witnesses the restoration of life he seeks he's just as horrified as any of his fellow Victorians would have been.

The ending is a bit predictable, but not really the point of the episode. It serves mainly to wrap-up loose plot threads, and tie the story together. Haeckel is killed by Elise's zombie child, Elise becomes a necromancer of her own right, and we find out that Elise was the witch from the beginning. More disturbingly, she seems to find the entire affair to be hugely romantic.

This is definitely an episode I recommend. Horror and comedy fuse like peanut butter and jelly, and the episode manages to be both downright disturbing, and absolutely hilarious.

Masters of Horror: Episode 11 Pick Me Up

Why is Fairuza Balk in this episode? Could someone please explain that to me? It’s not that I have anything against Fairuza Balk, but her character seems entirely redundant to this episode’s storyline. I’m thankful that director Larry Cohen minimized her time, having her disappear for most of the first half of the episode. Still, we’re left with a perfectly good episode, with one obvious glaring flaw. She seems to have been written in because a story about two dueling serial killers wouldn’t have a hero otherwise.

The episode opens with a classic horror set-up: A bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, stranding all the passengers. Serial killing truck driver Jim Wheeler (Michael Moriarty) offers them a ride. Two passengers agree to go with him, two others and the bus driver stay behind to get picked off by hitchhiking serial killer Walker (Warren Kole).

Names aside, the two eventually find out about each other, and each believes the other to be a trespasser in his territory. They’re relationship is complex. They don’t seem to be offended by the idea that their competitor wants to kill them, in fact it seems to be expected. And they share a mutual admiration for each others' skills. Their conflict is primarily in philosophy: Wheeler, while willing to kill the inconvenient, believes in seeking out dangerous prey. Walker, on the other hand, freely slaughters anyone who happens to be available, and sees Wheeler as pretentious.

While the episode does seem to suggest that this is their first encounter, the two have great chemistry. I imagine that you could cast these actors in almost anything and they’d fit together perfectly. I don’t even really care who wins, I just want them to keep talking for as long as possible.

And then we get to Stacia (Fairuza Balk). She was on the bus at the beginning of the episode, but decided to walk to a hotel. About twenty-five minutes in she appears again at the hotel. After a long day of killing people, Walker and Wheeler end up in the same hotel, with rooms on either side of her. After this point the episode becomes absolutely desperate to keep her alive.

Walker wastes time making scary noises, causing her to flee the hotel. She then accepts a ride from Wheeler, who she believes to be a cop hunting Walker. Wheeler decides he needs her as “bait” to lure Walker. Let me repeat that: Wheeler thinks he needs her as bait to lure in Walker, who is already actively planning to kill Wheeler! This is how desperate the episode is to give Stacia an active role.

Now, does this kill the episode? Absolutely not. However, her presence affects absolutely nothing, and her overacting can bring down an exciting moment like a joke that’s just been explained. All of her scenes could have been replaced with more interaction between Moriarty and Kole, or just more kills. I talk about her presence as a distraction mainly because it’s such a gaping and obvious flaw. We don’t need a sympathetic perspective. We’re horror fans. We can deal with Villain Protagonists.

This is definitely an ending worth talking about: After Stacia causes a crash (that could have happened without her), she’s injured, and the two Duke it out. All three of them end up picked up by two serial killers who drive an ambulance and look for injured people to murder. Meanwhile, I have a big stupid grin on my face at what is probably one of the best endings in this entire series.

This episode is just awesome! It’s pure bloody, campy fun from beginning to end. If you can watch it and not enjoy it you need to seriously rethink your entire outlook on life. No, it isn't scary, but who. cares.

Masters of Horror: Episode 10 Sick Girl

An interesting note about Sick Girl: This episode was originally intended to be directed by Roger Corman. However, he pulled out, and thus we ended up with Lucky McKee. As with William Malone, McKee is someone whose work I'm not familiar with, but McKee shows far more capability as a director than Malone did. This episode is much heavier on laughs than on horror, but I’m not complaining. Still, I do find myself curious how Corman's style would have worked for this episode. My suspicion is it was originally intended to be fun trash, rather than the somewhat classier black comedy we ended up with.

The main character is a lesbian entomologist named Ida Teeter (Angela Bettis), who is growing increasingly lonely as she's unable to find a partner who isn't creeped out by the pet insects she keeps around her apartment. Ida notices an attractive girl named Misty (Erin Brown aka former soft-core porn star Misty Mundae) hanging around the school, and asks her out. They go on a date, and lightning strikes, their personalities clicking perfectly. I’m a bit unclear on Misty’s role, as she initially seems to be a student at the school (albeit not in Ida’s class), but later in the episode seems to have no responsibilities and can fall into the role of a homemaker for Ida.

At around the same time Ida approaches Misty, she also receives a package containing a mysterious insect that she can’t identify, despite her best efforts. There's no indication of who sent the bug, but Ida is still fascinated by it as an unusual specimen. The night Ida first brings Misty home, the bug gets loose, sneaks around the apartment, and is able to bite Misty undetected.

The episode then follows a number of plot threads, but unlike the storyline of Fair Haired Child, nothing feels extraneous. All the developments are eventually paid off, and they interconnect, both physically and thematically. There’s also symbolism dripping from every scene, but this is a story where the overt works just fine.

The three main story lines are: the insect, Ida’s relationship with Misty as Misty grows sick and Ida cares for her, and dealings with Ida’s homophobic landlady, Lana (Marcia Bennett). There are also some entertaining and exposition-laden scenes with Ida’s co-worker Max (Jesse Hlubik), whose a pervert who seems to relate to Ida in a “one of the guys” sort of way. Over the course of the episode Misty grows aggressive and increasingly insensitive, as Lana flips out over both the presence of Ida’s pet insects, and the realization that Ida is a lesbian.

The ending is the perfect mixture of irony, humor, and horror. Ida discovers that Misty had been infatuated with her since Ida was a student, who had studied entomology under Misty’s homophobic father (the father is never shown on-screen). Misty’s father sent the bug, which used a strange toxin to control birds and mammals and hijack their reproductive systems to make more of its own kind. He had hoped the bug would infect Ida, causing Misty to reject her. He panics and sends Ida detailed information on the bug when he (somehow) finds out it bit Misty instead, but it’s too little too late.

Misty, under the bug’s influence, frightens Lana into falling down the stairs to her death, turns into a…bug…thing, kills Max, and infects Ida. It ends with them blissfully pregnant, under the bug’s influence, and waiting to give birth to broods of insects that will kill them both. The inconvenience of dying no longer seems to be a major concern for them.

I don’t want to comment too much on the symbolism, beyond the obvious “homophobes see gay people like insects.” I suspect more was intended, but some of that could be me reading too much into it. The episode's real strength, however, is in the leads. I get the feeling that this episode was written to avoid the standard gay stereotypes of having one partner be butch, as another was feminine. Instead, both partners are shy, socially awkward, and with a healthy mixture of masculine and feminine traits. The episode actually did the impossible and wrote gay people as something other than walking stereotypes. This shouldn't deserve a gold star, but sadly it kind of does. That's how shitty our culture is.

The episode benefits from good humor, some very talented and charismatic actors, and a director whose work I now very much want to check out more of. Beyond that, who doesn't love seeing a homophobe get her comeuppance? While it’s not Cigarette Burns, it’s one episode I have no qualms about recommending.

Masters of Horror: Episode 9 Fair Haired Child

When assessing film, I've heard arguments about whether “bad” is simply the absence of “good,” or if truly “bad” films need to do something to make you hate them. I think I’ve decided to call Fair Haired Child “bad” without anything especially atrocious in the episode. My problems can be boiled down to two simple thing: too much going on, and truly atrocious Dawson’s Casting. Neither of these led me to actively hate the episode, simply to wish it would hurry up and end.

I’m told by tvtropes that our protagonist, Tara (Lindsay Pulsipher), is supposed to be 13. Her actress was 24 when this episode premiered. She finds herself kidnapped and locked in a room with Johnny (Jesse Hadock), who the episode refers to as 15, but who is played by a 19-year-old actor. Eventually, she finds out that Johnny drowned many years ago, and she’s the last of twelve children who his parents have to sacrifice to bring him back from the dead permanently. He will transform into a monstrous form (the titular “Fair-Haired Child”) and dismember her.

When I say there’s too much going on, I refer primarily to Johnny’s parents (William Samples and Lori Petty). In a two-hour film they likely would have worked better, but here we get far too much on them: their guilt over their son’s death, their life as musicians, and their arguments over the ethics of what they’re doing. All of this just feels like a distraction from Tara and Johnny, whose relationship could have been better developed with the time.

The ending of the episode really drives this home, as Johnny is finally made articulate after spending most of the episode mute. He tells his parents that he was always jealous of their musical talent, wishing he could find a talent of his own. He announces that he finally has. He’s great at bargaining! The evil force that his parents invoked to revive him with twelve child souls has been talked down to reviving Tara with only the souls of two adults (I'm sure you can guess how that ends).

This falls flat mainly because it serves to remind us of how little we’d really gotten to know Johnny. He cares about Tara...and that’s all we know. Now this important character trait of “jealousy” is being told to us in the last moments of the episode, and serves only to give his parents their inevitable comeuppance.

As for the Dawson’s casting, maybe they couldn’t find better actors of the appropriate ages, but it really kills the mood. Even though we’re told Johnny is supposed to be 15, Tara and his parents speak to him as if he’s substantially younger, so I suspect a rewrite. I imagine that this episode would have been far more disturbing if Tara had actually been played by a 13-year-old, and Johnny had been aged down to 10.

I was a bit surprised to realize that William Malone is the first Master whose work I’m completely unfamiliar with. I’ve heard that FearDotCom is terrible, but I’ve never seen it. Nor have I seen either of his Tales from the Crypt episodes, I read through his entire IMDB page, and couldn’t find a single thing I’d seen that wasn’t this very episode.

That said, assessing him only on his work here, I find him to be uninspired at best. The Fair-Haired Child isn’t especially scary, and many of the visuals that attempt to be frightening are cheesy. Even Incident On and Off a Mountain Road succeeded in making the episode look scary. Here, there’s just nothing.

I say avoid this episode, unless you’re just determined to see the whole show. I don’t feel any strong hatred towards this story. In fact, I don’t really feel anything towards it. It just kind of is…

Masters of Horror: Episode 8 Cigarette Burns

When I realized I'd reached Cigarette Burns I leapt for joy...then I stared blankly, trying to figure out how I was going to talk about an episode dealing with such abstract concepts. While many of the other Master of Horror episodes are good, I would actually give this episode the distinction of being the single greatest work of John Carpenter's career.

This episode is clearly a follow-up to his Lovecraft-inspired Apocalypse Trilogy (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness). Most obviously it deals with some of the same themes as Mouth of Madness. Where that film was about the hunt for an evil author, here our protagonist, Kirby Sweetman (Norman Reedus), is searching for an evil movie, Hans Backovic's Le Fin Absolue Du Monde (The Absolute End of the World).

The element that gives Cigarette Burns the edge over it's predecessor is that it doesn't make the film the point. In Mouth of Madness Carpenter attempted to show us reality being torn apart by simply having things happen that didn't make any sense. I'm not saying that didn't work, nor am I claiming that we don't get some freaky imagery here, but the primary focus is on the humans.

Kirby follows a fairly straight-forward series of leads, each of whom has been directly or indirectly exposed to the film in some way, and each having had a different reaction to it. When the film is eventually watched we're shown only a few brief glimpses of it, and what we see is creepy. But far scarier is the idea that these people experienced something that actually justifies their behavior. The most memorable of these is a film critic who wrote a review of the film. He felt that his original review was “a joke,” and has spent years locked in a cabin, typing his “new review” to explain the film to the world. His entire cabin is now full of stacks and stacks of paper, all composing a single review.

The story benefits from the fact that pretty much every line spoken about the film can be interpreted in multiple ways, and watching it three times I've come up with at least half a dozen versions of what Le Fin Absolue Du Monde actually is. The film appears to have been made, at least in part, by filming the desecration of an angelic being, but even the nature of that being is never made explicit. My personal favorite explanation is that God gave the Angel to the film's director, and the horror of the film is that God is evil and takes delight in torturing his creations.

Whatever the nature of the film, it's implied that most people are too frightened to seek it out, even if they claim to want it. In another story the events might seem unbelievably convenient. Kirby was able to talk to only a few sources before being told to go see Backovic's widow, who agrees to give him the film. But when Kirby arrives at the late Backovic's penthouse, he's told that no one else ever made it up the elevator. Any of the previous people to seek the film could have found it, if they really wanted to.

As he closes in on the film Kirby begins to see Cigarette Burns appear in his life. Whenever they happen, Kirby's life suddenly cuts away to something else. In their first appearance he experiences a flashback to his addict wife's suicide. Later, when Kirby's life is in danger the Cigarette Burns signal a skip in the action. This happens on two occasions, both resulting in Kirby miraculously coming out on top of the conflict off-screen, surviving what should have been his death.

Kirby himself is a perfect balance as a protagonist for this story. He has enough characterization to give his journey meaning, but not enough to distract from the film. While his back story is mostly implied, we can gather he's a cinephile with a reputation for finding rare prints. His life fell apart when he became addicted to heroin and married another addict. He got a loan from his father-in-law to open a theater, which makes very little money due to his obsession with obscure art-house fair. Then, his wife committed suicide, and his father-in-law demanded repayment, threatening to close his theater.

Kirby was hired by a man named Bellinger (Udo Kier), who is determined to see the film before he dies. Initially Kirby simply wants to clear his debt with his father-in-law, but becomes increasingly fascinated by the film. He's exactly the type of person who would be drawn into the film's web: a cinephile, an addictive personality, and a desire to know what happened to his wife's soul.

I don't recommend this as an episode of Masters of Horror, I recommend it as one of the finest pieces of horror ever filmed. It's probably the closest anyone has ever come to truly filming Lovecraft. I could probably write a volume just giving different ways of understanding it. Don't just read what I'm saying, watch this episode and make your own interpretation. Ironically, Cigarette Burns is probably the closest the real world will ever come to producing Le Fin Absolue Du Monde.