So, regular visitors and readers here might recall an award-winning short film that pretty much scared the hell out of everyone who saw it, titled “Lights Out”. If you don’t recall it, you probably haven’t seen it (it is extremely hard to forget), but you can take a gander right here. Two more shorts by the same team found their way online, and the piece featuring them can be found here.
Anyway, we caught the second trailer, and it is also the stuff of nightmares. We dare you–no, we double dare you–to watch both trailers below alone in the dark…
This is the feature film debut of David F. Sandberg. However, he previously directed the original short that the film is based on. Here’s the official plot description from IMDB… now we have a backstory!
When Rebecca left home, she thought she left her childhood fears behind. Growing up, she was never really sure of what was and wasn’t real when the lights went out…and now her little brother, Martin, is experiencing the same unexplained and terrifying events that had once tested her sanity and threatened her safety. A frightening entity with a mysterious attachment to their mother, Sophie, has reemerged. But this time, as Rebecca gets closer to unlocking the truth, there is no denying that all their lives are in danger…once the lights go out.
“Lights Out” opens July 22nd at a theater near you. Oh, and the icing on the cake? David F. Sandberg decided to focus on practical effects and avoided as much CGI as possible.
You may have seen the “Milestone” widget in the footers counting down the days until It Follows (nice creepy title) will be out on VOD and DVD/Blu-Ray. Why, you ask? Read on.
It Follows–written and directed by David Robert Mitchell–garnered up a ton of positive buzz when it made the festival circuit last summer; reviewers went out of their way to praise the film and tell readers how frightening it is. We would include the creepy trailer here, but more than one review advised going into this movie knowing as little as possible about the details, and to avoid the trailer in particular. Some of the reviews say that the last act of the film is uneven, but none of them advise us to avoid the movie because of it.
So we will give you the official plot given out in the PR, which lets you know just about the right amount of detail:
For nineteen-year-old Jay, Autumn should be about school, boys and week-ends out at the lake. But after a seemingly innocent sexual encounter, she finds herself plagued by strange visions and the inescapable sense that someone, something, is following her. Faced with this burden, Jay and her friends must find a way to escape the horrors that seem to be only a few steps behind.
Here are ten excerpts from top reviewers that got us to put it on our Must-See List (with links and annotations, in case you want to read the actual pieces in their entirety).
“As bogeymen go, Mitchell’s monster is both intuitive (like something out of a bad dream) and impossible to comprehend (despite much discussion, no one seems to know how to beat it). The pic’s malevolent shape-shifter can take the form of anyone, from a beloved relative to a complete stranger. Sometimes it’s subtle enough to blend in with crowds. At others, it’s frighteningly conspicuous: a naked old man staring at you from a nearby rooftop, or a cheerleader leaking urine as she lurches across the living-room floor. The only certainty seems to be that it won’t stop until you’re dead. And once you’re dead, it will go after the person who “gave” it to you.“
2 .It’s a refreshing change for modern horror, which has become far too reliant on jump scares and deafening sound cues, in place of carefully mounting tension. Mitchell prefers a slow burn. The use of wide shots is particularly successful once Jay starts being pursued. It’s almost like a sick game of ‘Where’s [Waldo?]’ – find the plodding killer in the frame before it’s too late…
3. The rules of the damned in It Follows are intriguing and frightening. The never-named apparition will follow you forever, for instance, but it has to follow on foot. You can briefly elude the monster by driving away but it always comes back, leading to one shocking moment after another in which Mitchell’s impeccable wide shots gradually reveal a single individual gradually making their way into the foreground, while the oblivious protagonists ignore the audience’s pleas to RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! (Reviewed by William Bibbiani,* editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue MoviePodcast*).
There’s not a single character in Mitchell’s film that fails to elicit our sympathy, and so their demises always resonate like a tuning fork from Hell.
4. Once the scares start to come, they rarely let up. Mitchell, in only his second full-length, does an incredible job of creating horror not only in small houses in the middle of the night but in beachfronts with the sun shining down, in schoolyards on an overcast day, and in the middle of an empty street with nothing in sight… The highest compliment I can pay the movie is that its moments of horror play out like something from an old children’s ghost story. It’s not hard to imagine finding the tale within the pages of a collection of folklore akin to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (now with sex!).**
By this point we felt like grabbing all the cash we had on hand and tossing it frantically at the screen of the laptop we were reading on; sadly, we knew that wouldn’t get us the movie magically appear online to watch and we still had to wait. Here’s more of the praise heaped on It Follows by critics we trust.
5. It Follows is suspenseful, atmospheric and spine-tingling horror cinema which nods at the masters and completely astounds as it manages the tough feat of being striking, sensitive and utterly disturbing. (Film.list.co.uk, read more here)
6. Director David Robert Mitchell gives this an almost art-house vibe, mixed with a retro-eighties look and an amazing synth-soundtrack that sounds like a cross between Vangellis and John Carpenter. Mitchell does a brilliant job ratcheting up the terror throughout the film, and by the time the end credits rolled I was almost feeling queasy from how on edge I had been during the last act of the film. …IT FOLLOWS will likely become a big-time horror sleeper once Radius (who acquired the rights out of Cannes) puts it out, and if you can see this on the big screen that would be all the better. It’s a tremendous horror flick and the scariest film I’ve seen in years. It’s deeply, deeply unsettling. (JoBlo, click here to read the full TIFF review.)
7. Chris Bumbray at Reelfilm.com gave the movie 8/10 stars, even though he had problems with the last act of the film. Though it fizzles out to a slight degree in its final stretch, It Follows nevertheless establishes itself as one of the most inventive, exciting, and truly frightening horror flicks to come around in ages.
“More or less a contemporary horror fan’s dream come true.”
8. The movie’s a brilliantly fresh spin on a classic model – the pass-on-the-curse conceit which horror fans will know from MR James’s shivery short story “Casting the Runes”, and its numerous cinematic offspring, from Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957) to the Japanese cult hit Ringu (2000) and its American remake, The Ring (2002). It Follows – which deserves even more marks for that marvellously suggestive title – does this entire lineage proud, not just by switching tacks from runic subterfuge or videotape circulation to the rather Cronenberg-y gambit of inflicting a demon on your unfortunate sex partner. It’s altogether smart, subtextually fascinating, and more or less a contemporary horror fan’s dream come true. (Tim Robey, Telegraph UK)
“It’s a tremendous horror flick and the scariest film I’ve seen in years. It’s deeply, deeply unsettling”.
8. Fangoria LOVED this movie (8/10 skulls), and Chris Alexander (Fangoria Editor and the writer of this review) said this:. It Follows is an incredibly evolved, joyously alive piece of “dead teenager” cinema that likely requires a few viewings to properly assimilate its rhythms. And it could easily become part of any High School health class curriculum, because If I saw it as a kid, when I was at my hormonal, girl-hungry peak, I’d likely pack my bags and move to a monastery.
9. There’s a primal fear at work here – everyone gets nervous about being followed – and even though the monster is fiction, I suspect the anxiety may pursue the viewer home. (Luke Y. Thompson, Toplessrobot.com)
Well, that won’t be a problem, since we will be watching it at home, so the anxiety won’t have to follow us anywhere! Nope, it’ll be right there with us.
10. Finally, we can’t count the number of pieces in which the writer stated that John Carpenter was clearly a huge influence. Early John Carpenter.
It Follows will be in theaters and VOD on March 13th. The tagline is, “IT DOESN’T THINK. IT DOESN’T FEEL. IT NEVER GIVES UP.”
This just in: It Follows won the critic’s prize– AKA top honors– at the Glasgow International Film Festival. This isn’t a genre festival, either, which makes the win even more impressive. It even topped A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which, as you probably are aware, is no small feat. Read about it here.
We didn’t watch this trailer when it first was released several days ago– that’s how bad the backlash we read about it was. The people who saw it were angry in general, but they also agreed it was just, well, a shitty trailer that didn’t bode well for the quality of the upcoming movie. We finally broke down to see just how bad it was, and now wonder if they saw a different version of the trailer. While we’re not jumping up and down the way we were with, say, the red band trailer of the Evil Dead 2013 reboot, it could be worse. Take a look at the first full trailer below in HD.
Let’s see. On the one hand, all the cool stuff could be in the trailer, including the jump scares. We see several iconic moments and elements from the original 1982 movie from Tobe Hooper (more on that in a second), but some that we REALLY want to see are left out, such as the guy who starts seeing things and ends up having a really bad experience in the bathroom mirror (see below) . They’d better not leave this out if they know what’s good for the remake.
We also rolled our eyes at the iPhone getting static on it. One of the good things about the Evil Dead reboot was they kept the time period kind of vague; no-one fiddled with their iPhone, no-one Googled anything, and the clothes were kind of bland. We would hope they don’t try too hard to “update” the remake for “the new generation” of “millennials”, especially since they have a reputation of being lazy, self-entitled “assholes”* and we don’t care to see things dumbed down. There’s a couple of classic lines that would have been cool to hear (‘they’re here’ not being one of them) but our personal favorites are also kind of spoilers.
Another familiar moment…
Positives: The clown doll that scared the shit out of us and all the other kids (we were both maybe 11 or 12 years old when we saw it in the theater) the first time is back.** Lots of other elements from the original are tossed out for us kids of the 80s; we probably don’t have to point them out. The cast is solid. There are a couple of scares in the trailer that are new, and creeped us out (what would YOU do if you casually opened your closet door and saw about 15 pairs of ghostly, demonic eyes staring at you from the pitch dark?). They seem to be keeping the origin story–which was a pretty great one–and going with the basic plotline. The cast is solid (Sam Rockwell, Jared Harris) and the kid actors seem okay so far. The idea that you need to clear your mind because some evil entity that could easily kill you and/or a family member already knows what scares you and doesn’t need any more ammo is some serious nightmare material.
At this point we’re not getting out hopes up, but there is a possibility that this remake could be a fun ride. We know nothing they create will give us the haunted house roller coaster thrill-ride that we had seeing it in the theater for the first (and second) time as kids. However, it still could be fun, and the first movie proved a movie doesn’t need to be rated R to make you scream like a little girl, keep you firmly on the edge of your seat, and love it deep down.
Poltergeist is set for release on July 24th, 2015. Expect to read much more about it here before then!
*By the way, if you’re in that generation, we don’t hate all millennials and know some that are really cool. We just can’t stand the ones that give the entire generation a bad name.
**I doubt the ‘other half’ of Horror Boom will admit to actually being so scared that he scooted down in his seat in fear and covered his eyes in several parts (maybe he didn’t, I didn’t know him then), but I will. Knowing when several big jumps were coming–and sensing some others–seemed to actually make it more terrifying, for some reason.
Check out Drew Daywalt’s scary 2010 short “There’s No Such Thing…” below…
This is why, as a child, I never asked my mom or dad to check under the bed for monsters when they tucked me in. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to check myself…
We here at Horror Boom usually just have to ask for horror-themed gifts (unless it’s a sealed Blu-ray that doesn’t have bloody cover art) from each other. Just try asking your father or mother-in-law for ANY of the Crossed TPBs. All they would have to do is open it to pretty much any page and have nightmares for a week (or more, depending on whether it was one of the really nasty splash-pages) and wonder what horrible thing you saw as a kid that you repressed and never told them about. Last year Mrs. Horror Boom here dodged a bullet– sort of, because we’d all had a lot of wine and I grabbed it way almost in time– when I had asked my father (or maybe my sister, we were unwrapping gifts together Christmas Eve) for the Edward Lee novel Ghast and gotten it. The cover is fine; unfortunately, this is one of those small-press Ed Lee novels where he goes out of his way to scare off anyone easily offended in the first sentence of the book. It’s too nasty and violent to repeat here… unless someone asks me, then I’ll post it.
Anyway, here are some wonderful gifts you can give or ask for as a horror lover this year; they might even still be around on your birthday! We would do more than five, but the holidays REALLY snuck up on us this year (oh, we have plenty of… less than ten days, WHAT THE HELL?!) and if we list ten items in ten days, you won’t be able to get most of them in time for Christmas, or any other holiday you choose to celebrate. Let’s kick the door open on this series by telling you about…
1. The Babadook Actual Pop-Up Book
If you’ve seen the Aussie horror gem The Babadook (now on VOD), or the trailers caught your eye, you’ll know why this is such a cool product. Things are (relatively) fine in the movie until the main character makes the mistake of reading this pop-up book to her already-high strung young son at bedtime. She’s pretty sure she didn’t buy the book, and it’s one of those horror movie objects with bad vibes that a character keeps trying to throw away (even burning it at one point) but then keeps returning.
Anyway, if you are brave enough (I’m not, at least right now when it’s dark out and even the holiday lights are turned off) to purchase it, it seems that this project (the book, not the movie, though that already took Jennifer Kent a while) started as a crowd-funding campaign. They offered up a limited edition of 2000 books, signed by Jennifer Kent, and the goal of the project is getting the pop-up book published for everyone everywhere. The money came in pretty fast (hey, we would have bought it, if we had the extra money, but we’re on a low budget too) – there are thirty or so days more to go and they have sold over 3.000 copies! They are still for sale.
You can find all the details here,including the fact that this is not just the pop-up book we see in the feature film. Nope, there’s plenty more; this tale is actually a stand-alone story with a narrative, starring –who else– Mr. Babadook The link above is the original crowd-funding page and even though they have reached their goal, you can still get a copy that is. again, signed by the director and writer of The Babadook, Jennifer Kent herself) The site contains loads of info, including a clip of the movie showing the book being read by the mother to her son.
Just remember, after you buy it and especially after you read it, you won’t be able to get rid of “Mister Babadook”!
The GHOST puts on SMOOTH JAZZ and jumps at ANNA through a WINDOW.
GHOST
Ooh that was fun! I’m going to do that again!
(jumps out, again!)
ANNA WALLIS
Eeek, I’m mildly unnerved!
GHOST
Oh, just wait! Later I plan on pretending I’m a little girl, THEN I’m gonna whisper at you all creepy-like, THEN I’m going to dress up as a priest! Rawr!
EVERY GHOST AFTER JU-ON
Yo, try becoming visible from ONE VERY SPECIFIC CAMERA ANGLE! Then when she turns around… you’ll be GONE. It’s fun, trust us.
GHOST
But I feel much more comfortable dressing like a priest…
ANNA WALLIS
You’re the lady who died holding the doll in her arms! The logical thing to do is throw out the doll-
(does not throw out doll)
(wanders into dark basement instead)
-From the parody of “Annabelle” on The-Editing-Room.com, copyright Ian S. (2014)
So! We haven’t seen Annabelle yet, mainly because only one of us wanted to go, and the other didn’t want to let out ear-splitting screams (though from what I hear, there may not have been any) while we sitting by ourselves in the theater. Then I could have talked a friend into going who actually really liked The Conjuring, (2013) but the reviews were mixed and I got lazy and then it was out of theaters fast. It should be out of DVD/VOD pretty soon, though, now that we think of it…
So, Ian S., one of the funnier writers at The Editing Room, either dislikes modern horror movies, horror movies by James Wan, or both of the above. We know one thing: he reallyhated The Conjuring spinoff/prequel Annabelle!* All James Wan did was sign off on it, really, since he had nothing to do with writing or directing the “evil doll” movie, and he skewers him at one point too. However, if you’re already reading this, we’re guessing you have a good sense of humor, and even if you loved Annabelle, this “abridged script” should give you some good laughs.
The same writer also wrote a parody script of The Conjuring last year, and while he gave it one star higher, you can tell he wasn’t thrilled with it. We had a lot more fun with it than he did (I don’t think he’s sat through as many bad and mediocre horror films as we have, so he may not completely be sure what an above-average one looks like), but again, funny as hell. We posted it in 2013, but here’s a link to The Conjuring: The Abridged Script if you missed it the first time around.
*You can tell that even before you see that he rated it one-and-a-half stars out of five. Anyway, we’re still definitely renting it.
For some reason, we found “Pink Cupcakes” (which have never before sounded so unappetizing) to be the first real episode this season that really ...bothered us. Not that we found vicious killer clowns (who friends of ours understandably referred to as “Stabby the Clown”) with no lower jaw (due to a tragic backstory) cheerful or anything, and Twisty’s whole storyline had a perfect payoff. We don’t have a pathological fear of clowns, but he was pretty threatening. So I could have started writing these “Ten Things” pieces as usual, right after the premiere, but there weren’t any big plot or character reveals (okay, Elsa’s legs were a surprise) that Ryan Murphy hadn’t already either hinted at or flat-out told us about in the media, or that we hadn’t more or less figured out. We hated Dandy by the time the second episode he appeared in ended, and it was kind of obvious he wasn’t going to be a benevolent character. Last Wednesday, though, we got some good reveals, and for the first time, we exclaimed out loud in surprise, and really, really were disturbed by a murder enough to also curse loudly. So let’s get on with the show. One, two …three.
1. Del is a closeted gay. Well, of course he would have to be closeted even if he wasn’t a manly circus strongman for a living; as a gay man outed in a small town in 1952 you would almost certainly end up on the receiving end of a vicious blanket party, set on fire, or be the victim of another hate crime (or have your life ruined in some other way) if you were not closeted. That’s why we were genuinely surprised to see him at a gay bar, and more than that, desperately, hopelessly infatuated (and even professing his love) with guest star Matt Bomer, playing a smoking hot young man named Andy who turns tricks and hustles for a living. He basically referred to the bar as his office. It was hinted at before that Del was not 100% heterosexual, though you had to pay attention to pick up on it. Well, being married to a woman with a male member next to the female one was kind of a red flag, but it could be argued that if a man had an opportunity to be with a hot, gorgeous woman with three perfect breasts, he might be willing to overlook the male member.
2. …or what appears to be a male member. Turns out Désirée is all woman. Well, maybe even more than all woman, since she has three breasts and a clitoris large enough to be mistaken for a penis. When she’s hammered and lonely and turns to Jimmy to “make her feel something”, they both panic when his hand comes away from between her legs covered in blood and Ethel takes her to see the kindly, compassionate Dr. Bonham from “Edward Mordrake Part One”. He’s got some news for her: what she (and a doctor in her past) thought was a penis turned out to be a (very) oversized clitoris. It’s (figuratively) connected to her extra breast. He gives some medical explanation about her body producing a really, really high amount of estrogen because it was trying to compensate–it didn’t sound completely medically legit to us, but we will suspend our disbelief. He tells her surgery can give her normal-sized lady parts (we liked how removing the “accessory” breast wasn’t even alluded to as an option when doing surgery–hey, let’s not get crazy here!).
3. Désirée was also pregnant, and was bleeding so badly because she was having a miscarriage. The doctor tells her that she can even try again and having a child is a distinct possibility for her (though she should probably hurry because her biological clock is ticking). We see surprise, then wonder, then hope in her eyes as this sinks in. “I can have a baby with Del,” she murmurs. But, she damn sure has a change of heart before long, because…
Why are you still moving? You’re supposed to be dead!
4. By the time Del finds her, she’s packed a suitcase to movie into Ethel’s trailer. Del is desperate to get her to stay, and we half expected him to hit her or shake her or some other form of domestic abuse, but guess he knew better. She tells him she was pregnant, he says, “A baby… great!” half-heartedly, and then it escalates very quickly. Turns out she knows Jimmy is his son. She keeps telling him that he is the one with freak blood in him, not her, but all their years together he made her feel like she was such a freak of nature that she didn’t deserve anyone better than him …or a better life. She wants to have a kid, but not his. To add to Del’s despair, remember that this is taking place after Andy pretty much broke his heart, telling him Del he was delusional if he thought they would ever have any kind of relationship, or even contact, without having to pay like ever other trick. After telling him she was leaving him for a real man who deserved to be with her (and she tells Del what he calls her “big dick” is going to be surgically corrected by Dr. Bonham), Désirée leaves him standing there, with Del clearly about to have some kind of meltdown. Towards the end of the episode, Del pays a personal visit to Dr. Bonham and breaks his fingers, possibly his hands too. Then, just in case the doctor didn’t get the message, Del threatens to snap his grandchildren’s fingers “like twigs.” Soooooo, that surgery won’t be happening.
5. Stanley has an extremely creepy fantasy life. All of his lovely daydreams we saw underscored how vile a man he really is. His grandiose dream of Paul’s body floating in a tank before an awed crowd of horrible rich people was unsettling. The horrifying shot of the Tatler Twins torso floating in the glass display tank–and especially the fact that Bette’s head was dead and rotting probably days before he finally smothered Dot, who was begging him for help (and begging Bette to wake up) –was disturbing as hell. So was Stanley’s casual explanation to the museum owner he sold the body to when she asked how they “expired”: “The droopy one caught a cold and died first.”
Please …kill me. Please, kill me?
6. Elsa is getting desperate. She practically spits on the floor when Stanley tries to entice her with the idea of her own television show, but then when the entire crowd (not into anachronistic performances of songs, no matter how good they are) turns on her, we see her hopes burning to the ground. When Stanley comes by after the disastrous show, and she says to him wearily, “Tell me about zis… television,” we can see her fighting back tears. Once again, Jessica Lange’s performance on AHS breaks our hearts. She doesn’t get really scary until she sees Stanley driving away without her, Bette and Dot in the back seat. Her next move is to talk to the twins and tell them she wants to help their and look after them since they’re new to the business and Elsa is not. We didn’t expect, though, that she would drive them straight to the Mott residence in the guise of taking them in for a wardrobe fitting. “I have brought you something I believe you want,” she starts out to Gloria right before the episode ends. To be fair, I don’t think she would have taken them there if Elsa knew Gloria’s son was a blood-thirsty, homicidal sociopath. She probably just wanted them out of the way, maybe even only temporarily. How could THAT go wrong?
7. Maggie is having second thoughts. First she tells Stanley she did not agree to be involved with murder. Later, when she surprises Jimmy rehearsing, she pretends to read his palm and gives him a not-too-subtle fortune: something bad is coming for him, and he needs to get the hell out of there fast. She seems to be attracted to him, but still won’t let him kiss her. Hopefully she will end up ratting Stanley out more directly, and the freaks will end up cutting his throat and stabbing him (all together) about 70 times and then burning the body, the way they did with the police detective.
Jack the Ripper was a Windsor, for God’s sake.
8. Dandy’s mother Gloria is more batshit crazy–and darker–than we thought. At the very least, a sociopath. She’s mad at Dandy for killing Dora (“She was a mother!” is her first horrified reaction),but is pretty casual (and clever) about the way they dispose of the body. “These are special bulbs from Holland. Please do not question me!” she shrills at the men hired to dig a twelve-foot hole ( actually for Dora’s body). Oh, and we find out that Dandy’s father also had homicidal “urges”, due to inbreeding (according to Gloria). One day he ended up “swinging lifeless from a Japanese Maple” because he couldn’t stand struggling with his urges any more and “suppressed them the only way he could” (also according to Gloria). She tells Dandy he has to be careful who he kills, since it’s 1952 and they might have relatives who come looking for their missing family member; instead it needs to be people no-one will miss. The scene of them finishing up the bulbs planted over Dora’s corpse ends with on a disturbing note, with Gloria quietly telling her son, “we’ll figure something out.”
9. Jimmy is a local hero, though when Maggie points this out to him, he says, “Right now, I want to throw up.” Turns out Jimmy still feels terrible about poor Meep (though I bet the local chicken population is feeling better) being beaten to death in prison and then dumped in a sack on their doorstep. In the scene where Jimmy and Désirée are drowning their sorrows in her trailer, he loses it and weeps, “it shoulda been me.” Interesting trivia: Ben Woolf, the actor who played Meep, also portrayed the Infantata, arguably the most frightening character from AHS Season One, AKA Murder House.
There’s nothing worse than the hurt of loving someone you can’t have.
10. Dandy, unsurprisingly the new big bad (well, next to Stanley, who is also deadly but mainly just a greedy, scheming piece of shit looking for a big payday) is clearly just getting started. Either he or his mother decided a gay bar would be a good place to find a victim (we also loved the very serious MAN WANTED poster with an ‘artist’s sketch’ of a clown mask that Dandy passes). When Del leaves, crushed, Dandy zeroes in on Andy, and pays him a hundred dollars to come back to the Abandoned School Bus of Murder with him, and of course, things get really disturbing. The fact that Andy turned out not to be dead even after Dandy stabbed him brutally over a dozen times in the torso AND sawed one of his arms off was the first thing this season that really caused us to feel deep horror.
Stray Thoughts:
Gabourey Sidibe will be back as Regina Ross, Dora’s daughter in New York. We loved the “Mrs. Mott, I’m feeling really uncomfortable, so I’m going to go now” line of hers when she was on the phone with Gloria, who was starting to ramble about raising Dandy. We doubt she’s going to stick around more than a couple of episodes, though it would be nice if she ended up beating Dandy to death. That was also a great reveal when Gloria hung up the phone and the split-screen disappeared to show Dandy, standing in his underwear, covered with Andy’s blood.
Motion pictures are the expression of our souls, our inner dreams, our fantasies.
We knew the Bette and Dot torso in the giant fish tank was a fantasy, but did anyone else worry at first that poor Paul the Illustrated Seal was really floating in the formaldehyde and that the rest of the episode might be the flashbacks to how he ended up in there? We were unsure, but did let out a big sigh of relief when we realized what the writers had done. Everyone should probably worry about his place in the new knife throwing act, though…
I had a good laugh at the way Dandy at first tried to act innocent when his mother screamed because she found Dora dead with her throat cut. “Somebody’s broke into our home and murdered Dora!” he proclaims unconvincingly. Meanwhile, his mother, who immediately figured out that he did it , starts yelling at him about having to clean up his messes almost the second he rushes into the room. That smirk he got after he turned his back and walked away from Gloria to go to his room was chilling, as was his practicing ‘acting faces’ in the mirror.
That was an amazing monologue written for Del talking about the pain he goes through and how he is only strong on the outside, and Michael Chiklis knocked it out of the fucking park. It was obvious Del knew how desperate he sounded, begging Andy to let him get him a nice apartment with a record player and good light so he could sketch, to only be with him because he loves him so much, but the words kept flooding out as if he was trying to purge himself of something he’d wanted to tell another human being all his life. Give him a couple more scenes like that and Chiklis might just earn himself an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actor. For the record, a month has passed since Del and Désirée arrived in Jupiter.
Look around that ‘Morbid Museum’ in the scenes where Stanley is talking to the owner about the twins. There is some seriously disturbing stuff in there (and once again, we are 99.9% sure it was inspired by the real-life Mutter museum*). There are at least two Elephant Man-like skulls, and some really horrible things in jars.
I got a huge grin on my face when Jimmy referred to the pinhead duo as Salty and Pepper to the crowd after their act, which seemed to include a drum kit, a large mallet, and slapstick humor. “Salty and Pepper, Ladies and Gents!” We love it.
Boy, that crowd REALLY turned on Elsa fast. Guess they are not Bowie fans. Speaking of Bowie– great song choice to use of “Fame” in the montage of her getting ready to go have “publicity photos” taken (that ends with her hope being crushed). The self-satisfied smirk on Stanley’s face when he saw Elsa unravelling onstage made me want to break his neck …and I’m a huge fan of Denis O’Hare, so I have always taken his side before no matter how much of a rotten prick his character is –until that moment. Hopefully Stanley and Dandy will both get an even more horrible variation of the notorious Todd Browning “chicken lady” treatment.
Next episode, “Bullseye,” the freaks–including Ethel– seem to be turning on Elsa too. Check out the preview (again) below!
*Which I hope to visit some day, then sometimes during dark, sleepless nights question the decision of putting a visit to that house of horrors on my bucket list.
Possibly the most breathtaking still of the set yet.
You know, normally we’d just re-blog this, but this piece was so long and packed with interesting information– and dish– that we’re going to relate ten of the most interesting points given when Ryan Murphy spilled his guts (so to speak) on EW.com right after the American Horror Story Freak Show premiere …THEN give you the link. There’s plenty about the Freak Show season to come, that’s for sure. So, according to Ryan Murphy (and EW.com’s Inside TV, the source for all this)…
The new, all-animated opening credits have plenty of little hints in them, goodies for the fans that, if you pay attention closely, will tell you what will be happening this season (eek).
The colors in the credits are deliberately dimmed to signal “the end of an era” when it comes to the old-school-style freak shows.
Jessica Lange’s character Elsa was inspired by Marlene Dietrich (which fans have figured out by now), but also Bette Davis. The monkey-fur coat she wears is a real coat made of monkey’s fur, and weighs about 80 lbs, according to Murphy. The first time she wore it, the temperature was over 100 degrees. At some point, Lange got fed up and ‘made’ Ryan Murphy wear it to see how horrible it felt.
We will find out the back story about the big reveal at the end of the episode (Elsa’s legs). There will be lots of flashbacks.
Murphy knows what S5 will consist of and is interviewing actors now. He also says there are hints dropped about the theme during the first two episodes.
A scene usually takes 4-5 hours to shoot. If a scene has Sarah Paulson as the Twins in it, it can take 20 hours. Also, Ms. Paulson “pre-records most of her dialogue. So she’s wearing an invisible earwig when she’s doing scenes with herself,” Murphy explains.
Yes, that was a deliberate Baltimore accent Ethel (Kathy Bates) has. According to Murphy, she worked very hard to perfect and sound like a character straight out an earlier John Waters movie.
The woman billed as “The Tallest Woman Alive,” Amazon Eve (played by Erika Ervin), was written for a man (originally called Johnny Long in the Pants). The actress auditioned Murphy liked her so much that he re-wrote the part for her.
Jessica Lange never dated or had any, er, intimate relations with David Bowie (much to Murphy’s disappointment). There will only be five musical numbers tops, one a Fiona Apple cover, and a Lana Del Rey ‘song’ (we think they should have stuck with Bowie). Kurt Cobain’s name was also brought up, so hopefully they’ll pick a great Nirvana song.
There’s much, much more, including guest stars Matt Bomer and (hopefully) Neil Patrick Harris. The piece is a must-read if you’re already hooked on this season… which many of us are!
We say “possible spoilers” because this extra-long, final trailer has so much action (not to mention blood) that we are actually kind of concerned–especially because we watched it– that they don’t hold much back for the actual movie. Since the trailer is not on You Tube as of this writing, we have a link to it on Yahoo! Movies. You have been warned… oh, and it made us want to drive directly to the nearest movie theater showing it and see it ASAP. Consider yourself warned–watch at your own risk!
So! Does it make you want to bolt out and catch the movie right away, or are you concerned there’s too many scares given away in the trailer? We haven’t dug deeply to ask someone if this new trailer kinda shoots As Above, So Below ‘s load, but we will find out and report back to you. Oh, and screencaps are coming!
I’m pretty sure you couldn’t see in the green band trailer that she was holding what appears to be a dead infant…
HORROR BOOM 