The Monster Mash-Up Literary Fad

I want to weigh in today on a slightly-off-topic-but-increasingly-on-topic subject: monster mash-up classics.  Mostly these still reside in the realm of literature, but Hollywood is always looking for a good idea to cop, which is why we're all looking forward to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is slated for theaters next summer.

I have already expressed my enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, even while commenting on the dubious nature of casting (I have recently learned that Mary Elizabeth Winstead is playing Abe's wife Mary Todd, to which I say: I'm glad she's working again and I hope she can bring the crazy).  In addition, the rumor mill has been turning around Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (by the same author as AL: VH, Seth Grahame-Smith) for ages; first it was attached to Natalie Portman, then it wasn't, it had a director, then it didn't, then it did again, and now it's in that wonderful little blank space that projects occupy after they get a director but before they get actors.  I have no doubt that we'll be hearing more from it, and soon (that last article regarding director Craig Gillespie is dated April 19, 2011) but until then, Abe Lincoln is filming and the literary world is buzzing around these unconventional retreads of classic literature.

When P&P&Z was released in May of 2009, it garnered a whole lot of attention and spawned a mess of "sequels" (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Jane Slayre, Android Karenina, etc.).  Some of them are really good and some of them...not so much.  I read P&P&Z and enjoyed it immensely - I could not even finish S&S&S.  I'm embroiled right now in Alice in Zombieland, which, once again, I'm enjoying immensely.  And I adored Abe Lincoln.  In my personal view, I found P&P&Z to be so much fun because it was deliciously subversive: about 85% of it is Jane Austen's original prose, with key words and phrases interjected at the right time to transform the English countryside into a zombie apocalypse.  S&S&S, on the other hand, is almost entirely fabricated monster-story, and it didn't retain enough of the original text for me to find it clever or entertaining.  Alice in Zombieland is composed mostly of wording changes (instead of a White Rabbit, Alice follows a Black Rat down an empty grave), but I'm finding it retains Carroll's tone of the original work.  I think these stories work best when they stick harder to the original source material, which makes the horror-film changes that much more entertaining.  It's not all that witty or original to read about sea monsters assailing an island; zombies in an otherwise pleasant English countryside, on the other hand?  While everyone is speaking in charming Austenian dialect?  Fabulous.

But that's just my take - why have these taken off so well in the populace at large?  I may have read many of the canon works these monster manuals are based off of, but many people haven't (this is not a comment on the literacy of the US, by the way.  This isn't meant to be a chastisement.).  So why have people been devouring them off the shelves of bookstores and libraries alike?  My theory is two parts: the current mad popularity of anything supernatural, and the desire for people to cheat.

The spat of supernatural in the media can't really be denied, because it's everywhere.  My second point takes a little explaining: I think that many people read these books because they're easier to digest then the classics they're based off of.  This is my hypothesis and it's largely unfounded in statistical fact, but c'mon, how many people have read Anna Karenina?  I wouldn't go near it with a 20 foot pole.  Android Karenina, frankly, sounds both far easier to chew on and much more interesting (please don't kill me if you're a Russian lit fan). 

So anyway, that's my weigh-in.  In regards to the impending Lincoln movie: the first set pic has been released, and it's a suitably boring one of Walker in costume giving some sort of presidential speech.  (NOTE: I JUST learned that Rufus Sewell is in this movie, and he is NOT playing John Wilkes Booth.  WTF BEKMAMBETOV)  What I appreciate about this photo is what I appreciated about the book: in as many ways as possible, Grahame-Smith kept it historically accurate.  I mean, yeah, there are vampires, but the skeleton the story is hung on is historical fact that we know about Lincoln's life.  I think the movie will be more effective if it keeps that accurate feel, and from this (single, I know) photo, it looks like the filmmakers are trying to do just that.

The Human Centi-WHUT

I'd like to address an issue that is facing modern cinema, and that deeply concerns me. It has to do with a genre of film that I don't have a lot to do with, because I have a serious problem with horror. Any horror movie you watched that made you say, "Hey, that wasn't so scary," I guarantee it terrified me. There are TRAILERS I can't watch because they scare me so deeply. I once saw a trailer for the movie Slither and repressed it so deeply that when I had a nightmare about it, I had no idea where the images came to me from.

But I'm fascinated by horror: I can't watch it, but I read all about it. I beg people to know the ends to the movies I'm too chicken to see. I can spend hours on Wikipedia reading about these movies that I'll never see. You can imagine my fascination when I stumbled across a film called The Human Centipede, accompanied by a poster of a silhouetted person with two extra sets of arms. "Oh," I thought. "It's a monster movie. About a mutant person. With extra hands, and maybe extra legs."

Oh, how little did I know...

The trailer didn't work on my computer and now I know this is a blessing. The Human Centipede is a nightmare film the likes of which I hope never to see again. The plot is grotesquely simple: a mad doctor kidnaps three people and stitches them together into a "human centipede," connected by their digestive systems. Mouth to ass. And this is where I died a little inside.

Is this really what the horror film genre has sunk to? What happened to subtlety? What happened to letting our own minds provide the scare? Hitchcock knew how to scare without blood. Stephen King and his movie adapters understood that a a skillfully placed noise could make you shudder better than a medical freak show. When did filmgoers decide they'd rather experience vomit-inducing imagery than eerie cinematography?

The Wolfman

The Wolfman was AWESOME.

No, really, it totally was. It struck all of the right notes, from the dry-ice fog on the ground to the overwrought Gothic castle (complete with dry leaves crumbled on the floor!) and the tension-building violin music in the background. The story itself had some problems, but watching it was a joy. Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving are a triangle of fabulous acting and you can tell they were having fun: each of them owns their character, delivering a perfectly balanced triad of hunter, hunted, and orchestrator. Hopkins is perhaps the standout, portraying a loving, if distant, father figure with such subtlety you don't notice until its too late that he's been hiding dangerous insanity. Weaving and Del Toro have somewhat less complex characters to play, but they still deliver with a ferocity and believability that is engaging to watch.

Emily Blunt is completely wasted in her role as Gwen, the fiancee of dead brother Ben and later love interest of Del Toro's Lawrence, which is a criticism of the role rather than the actor. She is given hardly anything to do but simper, although she, also, takes hold of her role and acts the hell out of it. It is a testament to her skills as an actor that she is interesting to watch onscreen, even when all she is doing is running away.

There are moments of real fright in the film, moments that make your skin crawl and moments that make you jump out of your chair. The score plays a big part in this - in any other instance, I would have said it was over dramatic. Here, though, EVERYTHING is so over dramatic that it loops back around to believable. The movie picks an aesthetic and sticks to it like nothing else, and it is SO over the top that you can't help but get drawn in. Right down to the end credits, which are played over various medical sketches and diagrams attempting to illustrate some of the "science" behind lycanthropy, the film owns its vision, and it is a vision I love.

What I loved most about The Wolfman is that it, somewhat like Underworld, takes pop culture back to the roots of lycanthropy: unromanticized and violent, deformed and doomed. These are not Stephanie Meyer's "werewolves," they are not Anne Rice's, they are not the self-aware shapeshifters that run freely with the wolf pack and can change at will. They are MONSTERS. There is nothing romantic about Benicio Del Toro's plight, and Gwen KNOWS that - as she frantically searches for a way to save him, she comes to the same realization that the audience does. For Lawrence, and for anyone cursed like this, there is only one solution, and there's no getting around that. Not a happy ending, but a necessary one, and I personally don't think it could have ended any other way.