Fear Itself: Episode 5 Eater

I'm so happy Stuart Gordon was one of the Masters they were able to keep. The man has a talent for the uncomfortable. I'm not sure if I'd define this as a Lovecraftian story in the way most of his films are. This is a story about supernatural forces being used by humans, and human life is treated as valuable. However, I do see a common trait with Re-Animator: a villain for whom rational motivation seems a lot less important than “because I can.”

Duane Mellor (Stephen Hart), a cannibalistic, voodou-practicing serial killer, is arrested and brought into a local police station. The precinct is already a tense environment, due to resentment of new recruit Danny Bannerman (Elizabeth Moss). Bannerman's status of horror-movie fan, female, highly competent, rookie police officer doesn't exactly endure the her co-workers to her.

The early scenes with her are standard, but fairly well done. I think her horror movie addiction was thrown in, both to make her more relatable to the likely audience (duh), and to add a new element to the tension. Women and rookies being hated in the workplace is pretty common. So, they throw in a geek element, and it makes for a few decent lines of dialogue. Plus, Elizabeth Moss does a good job.

Then, Mellor gets out, and begins eating the still-beating hearts of her co-workers to assume their forms with his vodou powers. This is what I meant when I said that motivation was unimportant: Why was Mellor even caught if he can just shape-shift whenever he wants. He can apparently also copy the voices and memories of his victims perfectly. Given his apparent super-human strength, and off-screen teleportation, you'd expect him to be sunning himself on a beach somewhere, in the form of the most convenient billionaire by now. But, no, apparently torturing police officers is more his style.

Taking the form of Bannerman's colleagues allows Mellor to draw on both her familiarity, and their resentment. Ironically, Mellor seems to have far more respect for her than most of her colleagues, with the exception of her Sergeant (Russell Hornsby). He seems to save her for last precisely because he thinks that terrifying a horror-move fan is fun. The fact that she's substantially smarter than those around her is likely also a factor. He's in this for the sport.

The ending, while I'd question it's biological feasibility, seems like exactly the kind of genre-savvy thing a horror geek would attempt: kill the cannibal by covering your neck with rat poison, and then eating some. I imagine a fairly substantial dose of rat poison would be required to kill a man the size of Mellor, but one bite of Bannerman was all it took.

Still, I don't approach a Stuart Gordon film expecting to be overwhelmed by realism. Re-Animator is character-driven silliness at it's core. By comparison this could be a documentary.

This episode, while less objectively well constructed than In Sickness and In Health, is both scarier, and more entertaining. Moss is a lot of fun to watch, and Hart is downright terrifying. I could complain about the demonization of vodou, but why waste my breath. The episode is fun, and that's all I have to say on the matter.

Masters of Horror: Episode 24 The Black Cat

I love Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs. That said, however, this is not what I would have expected from them. It isn't horrible, but I honestly have no idea what tone they were going for. It varies wildly between drama, camp, and gore, and the depiction of Poe seems to be based on the now-discredited biography written by Rufus Griswold. Whether Gordon thought that Poe really was a drunken madman, or just thought it would make a good story, I don't know.

To spoil the ending: It's all a dream. The entire point of this story is that Poe (Combs) was desperate for money to treat his wife's (Elyse Levesque) tuberculosis, and had a bad dream that inspired him to write The Black Cat (I have not yet read that story, so I can't comment on the relation between it and this episode).

I suspect they made this episode a dream mainly so that they could feature a series of bizarre events that would have been mentioned by Poe's biographers had they actually happened. I certainly think it would be common knowledge if his wife had been prematurely declared dead, and he tried to burn down their home with her body in it, after hanging his cat. Honestly, I think this episode might have worked better if they'd simply declared it to be an alternate universe, and left it at that.

To address the actual plot: Poe's gets into a conflict with his cat, Pluto. He seems to be looking for excuses to blame the cat for the problems of his own alcoholism. He gouges out the cat's eye for distracting him, even as he's ignoring his writing to drink. He blames the initial “death” of his wife on the cat killing their other pets, even though she was primarily upset about Poe's drinking. After the cat and his wife both return from the dead, the cat with a white mark where Poe's noose had been, he kills his wife with an axe he swung at the cat and walls her body up in the basement (yes, The Cask of Amontillado, I know that one). The cat somehow gets into the walls with his wife's corpse, and mimics the sound of her screaming to draw the police. Poe runs, and the dream comes to an end, with the usual “everything is fine” moment. There's no shocking final twist, Poe writes his story and the episode ends.

I'm discussing the plot briefly because there isn't a lot to discuss. This episode moves slowly, and by the end is rather tedious. If they were going to make the whole story a dream, I would have at least expected some effort to make it a truly thrilling dream. Surely the director and star of Re-Animator could have managed something appropriate to that task.

The episode is well made, with good production values and acting, but I can't really recommend it. It's like a slow drama occasionally interrupted by bits of ham and gore in the style of Re-Animator, as if even Gordon was getting bored with this story.

Masters of Horror: Episode 2 H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House

I have somewhat mixed feelings about H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch-House (yes, Lovecraft's name is part of the title). It certainly takes more risks than the first episode, and that alone scores it points with me. It's an attempt to adapt a very non-visual story into a visual medium. It was one of Lovecraft's stories that dealt heavily with the indescribable, and so we can't see a true visual representation. Most writers would have simply taken the name, and rewritten the story from the ground up. Instead, it's clear real effort was made to remain as true as reasonably possible to the source material, while moving it to a modern setting.

Walter Gilman (Ezra Godden) is a graduate student studying String Theory, who moves into a house dating back to Colonial times, that's now used for renting cheap rooms. His two neighbors are Frances (Chelah Horsdal), the poverty-stricken woman with an infant son named Danny (David Racz), and Masurewicz (Campbell Lane), a strange old man who prays very loudly at night. He quickly develops a friendship with Frances, giving her money to pay her rent, and helping her look after her son.

Masurewicz, however, believes that the house is haunted by a Salem witch (Susanna Uchatius) with a human-faced rat as a familiar. Obviously, Walter doesn't take him seriously until he begins to have dreams of the human-faced rat and the witch. He also begins sleep-walking during his dreams. On one occasion, he abandons Danny while Frances is out, and on another he finds himself at the Miskatonic Library, somehow having attained access to the copy of the Necronomicon the University keeps under lock and key (anyone familiar with Lovecraft will know the names).

The full story is eventually revealed through a conversation between Walter and Masurewicz. I think this works better than most exposition scenes because both characters are involved in the exposition. Masurewicz explains the witch's motivation, she uses young men who move into the house to sacrifice children. Walter, being a physicist, is able to clarify how she does this. She “haunts” the house by using it's bizarre architecture to travel between dimensions

This is, however, where the story's real weakness comes in. Geometry that allows for interdimensional travel should, by it's very nature, not be something we humans can visually represent. So, we end up with an apartment that has a weirdly-shaped corner. It's a sacrifice you make, I suppose.

The ending is effective mainly because it allowed neither the hero nor the villain to “win.” Walter is able to kill the witch, but the rat still kills Danny. Walter is blamed for the death, and immediately committed to an asylum, but the rat returns and finishes him as well. So, everyone dies but the rat.

Ultimately, this is a good episode. Director Stuart Gordon has worked with Lovecraft's material before, and he does have a tendency to substitute sex and blood for the scary ideas in the source material (not that I'm complaining), but here there's a nice balance. If you want to just watch the “good” MoH episodes, this would definitely be one to check out.