#i'm assuming things are going to escalate because it's a horror movie but like just the situation these people got themselves into makes me

[pinkieroy]

The scene of them trying to justify why they left without saying goodbye is truly horrifying to me an autistic person who hates conflict, doesn't know how to explain feelings, and doesn't know how to say no

[ewingstan]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9-11 for whatever Worm characters come to mind! (Or Sophia/Calvert/Taylor/Krouse if you have any thoughts!)

Fuck it. All of em for all of em.

1. Why do you like or dislike this character?

Sophia: I'll be real I don't feel super strongly about her. She's written to be hateable in an effective way, but she's less of a full character than Emma despite being in much more of the story. And her shit kinda gets bogged down by racist writing (a lot of the worst of it happening right before Aisha's introduction, which is also pretty racist). She's involved in a lot of cool and interesting moments but they're rarely interesting because of her.

Coil: Works really well as the first overarching villain in Taylor's story. He's able to sell the "I'm a bad guy but in an excusable way that's not really too bad" well enough, but also has a lot of obvious red flags even before the Dinah reveal. So you can understand perfectly well why Taylor, a kid who really wanted to continue hanging out with the undersiders and do things that made her feel like she had any control, would go along with him. But you can also take a step back and say Jesus, only a kid who really wanted to continue hanging out with the undersiders and do things that made her feel like she had any control would go along with him.

Taylor: Wildbow has a reoccurring tendency to focus on characters who are both incredibly smart and can get an incredible amount of info quickly, but only in specific limited ways. Its true of Taylor, Lisa, Sylvester, Kenzie, Mia—a lot of my favorites. But the interesting thing is that they're never smart in the same ways, never collect the same sort of info. Lisa has general super-induction but no great skill at making plans. Sylvester can read and manipulate people to a superhuman level but is constantly getting blinded by his own resentments and desires. Taylor's hyper-vigilance gave her the ability to see and react to everything external around her, but no means or real incentive to know whats going on internally with people around her. And it makes sense! She's incredibly afraid of letting people in who'll end up hurting her; people who've genuinely been kind to her in the past have used their previous closeness to hurt her later! Knowing that someone doesn't mean her harm now isn't gonna reassure her, so its safer to assume everyone's a threat and not worry too much about what they're actually thinking.

And then there's Rachel, who she not only connects with emotionally, but is the only person who's able to make an emotional connection with her! And since you understand why its not the norm, its all the more incredible to see!

Krouse: oh I'm glad you asked

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

Sophia: I like that she and Lung both get wrapped back up in the end for Skitter's Gold Morning missions. I wish she got to do more in those, but I do like it as a story beat.

Coil: How high he got and how far he fell.

Taylor: Man the escape from Coil's trap is a fucking great chapter. She's a one-woman horror movie. Single-handedly sells her as a villain who'd get national attention, and its not even a moment the public knows about. And its in such a great place in the story too, where all the tricks she's using have been established so its not feeling like a weird escalation in her abilities, but she hasn't all employed them at once or to such incredible effect yet. It’s the real culmination of her taking “lessons” from Bakuda about being scary.

Krouse: One of the moments that really sold me on him was when he was getting attacked by Case 53s, and immediately started thinking about how he could take them down, before he interrupts his own thoughts to go "wait, what am I doing, I should just run away." It just sells so much of his whole deal. He's a great on-his-feat thinker, he can be an incredible strategist when he's on his own, but he also doesn't share Taylor's suicidal urge to face any problem head-on. Its kind of the inverse of one of Taylor's early establishing moments: after getting attacked by Rachel, she reaches for a reason to calm down, realizes she doesn't have one, and immediately retaliates hard enough to get blood on her boots. God they're such good foils, its weird that the extent of their relationship is mutually disliking each other. Not even intense dislike in either case.

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character?

Sophia: That the black member of the trio is the one that consistently gets physically violent, is characterized as the athletic one compared to the others in general (instead of "the cute one" or "the prep" she's "the track star"), gets described as being savage multiple times, doesn't have much of a character outside of sucking despite being in a work that's otherwise really good at giving internality to people who act shitty, all that jazz.

Coil: How little sense we got of what Calvert's dominion would really look like. That we didn't get much of his takeover without other disasters interfering actually works—it fits the themes of constant conflict interfering with stability and safety. But I still want more of a sense of what Calvert wanted.

Taylor: I didn't care about her reunification with her mom. I say a lot that the ending of Worm is one of the best endings of any story I've read, and that's true of Gold Morning as a whole, but I don't actually care much about the last epilogue. The Brian reveal certainly doesn't help there.

Krouse: Do you know how much it sucks that when people ask me who my favorite worm character is, the tumblr sexyman is in contention?

4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?

Sophia: any story that takes her basic parts, gets rid of the obviously shitty stuff, and develops her into a real character.

Coil: Disney Channel sitcom

Taylor: Well I already tried expy-ing Khepri into my tabletop campaign, and that got mixed results, so I'll take TTRPGs off the list. I'd be interested in her getting put in a medium where you'd have to be creative with how to represent the bug cloud, like live theater.

Krouse: I was gonna say Mob Psycho but then I remembered that they already had a guy who teleported around being a jackass. But I would like too see a well-animated version of his fighting style.

5. What's the first song that comes to mind when you think about them?

Sophia: I'll Make You Sorry by Screaming Females

Coil: For some reason I get an Everything Everything vibe from him? Maybe Photoshop Handsome or Breadwinner.

Taylor: I don't actually read her as trans but Dysphoria Hoodie is what immediately came to mind. I'm at least theoretically still making a Cicada Days animatic about her. I think portions of BCNR's Sunglasses fits with whats going on internally with her in the Mannequin fight

Krouse: Want to make a Prowl Great Cain AMV for him one day. Lyrics fit perfectly, and the way its sung gets the same otherwise inexpressable intensity of how I feel about him. Darnielle said “This is a song about betrayal. A lot of songs about betrayal are about betrayal and redemption. Not this one.” And yeah, that's Krouse!

9. Could you be roommates with this character?

Sophia: Oh, no

Coil: It would prolly be fine except for how he'd torture a branch of my psychological continuity and then effectively kill it by destroying that reality whenever I leave the dishes out too long. Don't correct me on how his powers work

Taylor: Uhhh probably not. Even if I wasn't much older, I don't really talk to my roommates unless they're the talkative sort. She's been stuck living with clamshells before, it wasn't good for her.

Krouse: I'd have to kill him

10 and 11: alright these are "could you be best friends with" and "would you date" and in both cases the fact that I'm 23 means no. I don't have Blake's ability to form rich friendships with people much younger than me. And I'm not interested in Calvert as a friend or a lover.

[pb-dot]

Film Friday Halloween Special: Dear David

Now today isn't Friday, but it is Halloween, and in tending my yearly tradition of lounging around watching horror movies, I stumbled across this mystifying thing. Now for people who are better at the internet than me this apparently started as a creepypasta-style Twitter thread, and I can imagine this context might explain a couple of things. Regardless of the internett-ness of it, though, I found this film fascinating through the lens of the "writing about writing"-meta aspect of the whole thing, which is good, because the scares were pretty mediocre.

For the uninitiated, Dear David is the story of comic artist Adam Ellis, whose comics you undoubtedly have seen shared around somewhere on social media on account of how acutely relatable his comics aim to be. Many jokes have been made by Ellis himself and the other "relatable comics guys" of the world of the faint whiff of existential terror producing such content might instill, the so called "Garfield Effect," I like to call it.

Rather than take the bland-by-design in the direction of say, Garfield Minus Garfield, Lasagna Cat or the "I'm Sorry Jon" subsubgenre (it is still wild to me that three so distinctly different projects have formed to pry meaning out of Garfield, but that's another story for another day,) Ellis goes for contrast. This tale starts with the assumption that churning out hashtag relatable hashtag content is a kind of soul-draining irony-poisoning kind of status quo to live in, and then throws a wrench into this (arguably unhealthy) stability in the form of an internet ghost really deciding to fuck with it all.

It is somewhat unclear how the ghost known as David, or Dear David, zeroes in on the content creator, other than being attracted to people being jerks online, in which case I have to assume Mr. DD is a very busy ghost. Once he has zeroed in on Adam, though, he finds the artist a fertile ground to hoe, starting with sleep paralysis, and escalating to delusions and digital fuckery to really separate Adam from his support network, not exactly oversized to begin with, as is the Milennial's lot.

If I have one main problem with the movie apart from the scares not being all that, it's the digital fuckery. I get that the ghost needs to have some control of devices Adam uses to connect to the internet, and that he might employ these to fuck with the hapless comic artist further. So, sending DMs in Adams name, yeah sure, that makes sense, redownloading Grindr to make Adam's boyfriend think he's being unfaithful, yeah that's fine, but when we see that the ghost has even provided spectral chat logs with randos, something about that seems to cross the line from believable to unbelievable for yours truly. Like how deep did this whole thing go? Did the ghost actually send out a bunch of messages? Did he send out a bunch of u up messages and then, pardon the terrible pun here, ghost them? Idk, I feel like the grindr bit kind of stretched the story a touch, as if there was an IRL infidelity here that the scriptwriters don't want to get into. Not flinging any accusations mind, it's just a very specific fracture in the suspension of disbelief.

The movie has a decent understanding of The Internet in how it portrays it, although I do find myself wondering if using a MSN Messenger lookalike as a medium for the trolls of yesteryear was the best choice. I'd have gone for a forum or, god forbid a chan-like. Granted, 4chan was not invented in 1996 when the ghostening were to occur, but Messenger didn't come online before 2000 either. I suppose it was a big ask to show the audience the mean streets of mIRC, although I would have liked that quite a lot, personally.

Now, where the movie gets interesting to me is in the character of Adam. Being irony-poisoned and Over It on the internet isn't exactly an unique ailment to have, but I do like the things the story does with plunging Adam into a highly subjective story. Literally nobody else sees the things that he sees when the ghost is fucking with him, and try as he might to communicate this in a way that he communicates most things gets met with cynical "pics or it didn't happen" type of a response. This is an idea I wish so dearly that the movie held on to all the way to the end. Sure, I can watch people possessed by ghosts turn the tables on their spectral foe through willpower or the will to live or the power of love all day, but just once it'd be cool to see genuine connection and empathy be the thing that saved the day. The movie does hint at this as Adam realizes David was a budding artist before disaster and/or The Internet Devil got its hold of him, but it doesn't really add up to anything.

Anyway, as I constantly have to remind myself, we review the movie we watched and not the one we wanted. As it is, it's an "artist confronted with his demons/the people he have hurt" type of story, and it does get a bit self-indulgent with it in a way that I feel a lot of creepypasta-adjacent media often get. Of course this whole big thing turns out to revolve around the POV character's neuroses and character, odds are good he's writing the damn thing. However indulgent it may be, though, I can't lie, it is heartening to see our protagonist realize that while he has hurt people and been kind of a dick, he shouldn't have to die for it.

In the end, Dear David is an OK movie, not great, but certainly good enough to give a watch. As far as "getting" the internet you may get better results watching Cam (2018,) and Host (2020) and Unfriended (2014) might have better scares. On the other hand, it is kind of nice to see a horror movie with a MLM protagonist and the gay bit not being this huge pivotal thing (yes I know Grindr is a plot point, if it was het it'd be Ashley Madison, nbd.) Overall, I'm not mad I watched it, but I'm going to have to cue up some classics to get the spook percentages up while I finish off these boops.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/11/2022: MONKEY SHINES

MONKEY SHINES drives me crazy for the sole, stupid reason that for much of my life, I have been walking the earth assuming that it is a Stephen King adaptation. This is absolutely not true. I'm sure I just think this because of George Romero's frequent collaboration with King, and because its famous poster so has the bold, exaggerated look of pulp horror covers from the 1980s. MONKEY SHINES is adapted from a novel by British author Michael Stewart, but the screenplay is by Romero himself. It is entirely possible that by 1988, a lot of King's style and approach may have rubbed off on the director, so maybe I'm not completely crazy for harboring this delusion: it's got psychic powers, a domestic animal that goes berserk, and small town drama overlayed with outrageous sci-fi and horror elements. But still, it bugs me that I thought this. I should know better!

MONKEY SHINES is a deeply weird movie that passes for normal due its above-par production value, fine performances, name brand actors, and naturalistic dialog. Perhaps also in the heyday of writers like King and Michael Crichton, this wacky sci-fi thriller, about a paraplegic who forms a corrupting psychic link with his helper monkey, didn't seem so unusual. But inside of this mainstream thriller is a freaky psychodrama with which Freud would have had a field day.

A Capuchin helper monkey named Ella enters the life of law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) when an accident renders him paralyzed from the neck down. His days are brightened by Ella's surprising competence and seemingly personal affection for Allan—and by the arrival of her trainer Melanie (Kate McNeil), who also develops personal feelings for Allan. However, the deeper Ella and Allan's bond grows, the more Allan is given over to emotion, struggling to control his escalating rage. Eventually it comes out that Ella is a test subject for an experimental drug, and as the resulting mind meld with Allan makes him more animal than man, it also enables Ella to act out Allan's wrathful impulses.

Somehow the monkey part of the movie isn't as bizarre as the interpersonal drama. When Allan becomes paralyzed, his whole existence turns into a power struggle with the women in his life. His plight begins when he is cuckolded by his own surgeon, and without his girlfriend around to help out, his mother Dorothy (Joyce Van Patten) forces her way into the house. Dorothy forms a sort of infantilizing tag team with the pious Nurse Maryanne (Christine Forrest, Romero's then-wife and frequent collaborator), from whom Melanie and Ella have to defend Allan. Where Maryanne is a castrating school marm type, Dorothy is inappropriately intimate with her son, insisting on bathing him and trying to drive out his new girlfriend. Melanie is mainly worried about Allan's increasing loss of civility…and also, perhaps, about Ella's increasing possessiveness. The monkey is firmly the other woman. There are male antagonists in the film—ambitious, inhumane scientists played by Stanley Tucci and Stephen Root—but they tend to take a back seat to Allan's conflicts with women. From his wheelchair-bound position, Allan needs to literally grow up, wresting power back from his nurse, putting his mother in her place, and choosing a mature relationship over the regressive, obsessive affair with the monkey.

MONKEY SHINES may look like a regular mainstream movie of the period, but with all that going on, it has more in common with a neurotic exploitation movie like THE BABY, or SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS, or BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER. This may not be the sort of place where you normally expect to find a bunch of psychoanalytic rumination, but it's sure in there, and it's part of what makes MONKEY SHINES so surprising. That, and the fact that it's not a Stephen King movie.

But, there is one more thing about MONKEY SHINES the surprised me, personally. When I first started dating my husband some eleven years ago, we hit it off immediately, but we seemed like a pretty unlikely pair. I was (am) an inverted little horror ghoul, and he was almost aggressively normal: a friendly, handsome data specialist who liked beer, bikes, and coffee, and whose cultural tastes skewed just a little indie. I wasn't sure what I could have to offer such a person, but on our third date, he made an effort to reach across the aisle by informing me that when he was a kid, his mother's therapist was the former owner of one of the monkeys in MONKEY SHINES. We don't know if it was the star, Boo, or one of the lab extras (probably the latter), but this therapist had a framed lobby card mounted on his waiting room wall featuring the movie's shocking key art. My husband used to have to stare at it while he was waiting for his mother's appointment to end, and when he finally asked about it, he learned that the doctor used to have one of the movie's animal performers. When my then-new boyfriend told me this, I nearly fell out of my chair, and we've been laughing about it ever since.