Scarred - Jim Mickle
With the end of 2007 rapidly approaching I’ve been giving a lot of thought to which are my favourite horror movies of the year. One film that keeps fighting for the top spot is Mulberry Street, which I caught at the Fantasia Film Festival over the summer. It’s about as straightforward a siege film as you can get, with the denizens of a New York City tenement building fighting off hordes of people infected by a rat-borne virus. What really struck me about the film was how director/co-writer Jim Mickle and actor/co-writer Nick Damici made the audience care about the characters by making the characters themselves care for each other. It’s easily the best independent horror film I’ve seen in years, and you can catch it on the big screen as part of the 8 To Die For horror festival taking place across the United States. Don’t miss it.
“Black Hole” the Charles Burns graphic novel
There’s something about this comic series that had a pretty horrifying effect on me that’s been hard to shake, even if I wanted to. The story concerns an outbreak of a sexually transmitted “teen plague” in the 1970s Northwest. A group of teenagers start catching it, and it leads to all sorts of weird mutations and bodily “changes”. It’s a dark and heavy thematic dish with all kinds of metaphors for AIDS, puberty, and twisted coming of age dramas. It’s SOOO damn creepy while somehow managing to be completely heartbreaking throughout. Narratively and artistically it’s perfect, and you can’t help but be emotionally haunted by all of the characters, fumbling around in search of what they hope is adulthood, only to become mutated outcasts living in a colony in the woods. It’s all presented in a kind of surreal back and forth between two kids dealing with their own bizarre anatomy changes, and by the end of it I found I was actually getting choked up.
On top of the absolutely gorgeous B&W illustrations, there’s something weirdly primal about the whole story and the way it’s told, and that’s what makes something truly scary, when it’s touching on universal fears besides just “run for your life and don’t get killed”. Some characters grow mouths on their necks, some start shedding their skin, and some grow a tail (all beautifully drawn). The details sound kind of ridiculous out of context, but somehow Burns took me back to my squeamishly awkward health classes and makes a completely original horror story out of unprotected sex and adolescent ignorance. Once the characters start turning on each other, and teenage depression kicks in, you start feeling the helplessness of these kids in a strangely uncomfortable way. The artwork is dreamlike and minimalist and hyper-real in its own way, so you can identify with the characters while projecting all your own weird fears into their head. It’s never jaw-droppingly terrifying, but the allegory is deeply effective in a kind of Cronenberg fashion, only the sweet and naive narration by the main teens gives it more emotional depth. I usually go for comics for the artwork, or the hard to find great writing, but this one’s the perfect mix of both. I remember finishing it and not being able to close the book for a while, so it’s stuck with me a lot longer than the usual “scary” suspects.
Read it and dig it!