• About the Author
  • The Thorns Series
  • Standalone Novels
  • Horror Worth Watching
  • Contact

Amanda M. Blake

~ Of fairy tales and tentacles

Amanda M. Blake

Tag Archives: halloween

REVIEW: Trick ‘r Treat Watchalong

31 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by amandamblake in Movie Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cult classic, gore, halloween, horror, movie review, review, sam, samhain, trick 'r treat, watchalong

For Halloween, I thought I’d put on a staple and enjoy the heck out of watchalong commentary in lieu of a straight review. Trick ‘r Treat is a perfect watchalong review, because it’s 1) timely, 2) fun as hell, and 3) an anthology, so it’s already broken into pretty little pieces. Like Creepshow, it’s a throwback to the cheesy, joyous, gruesome horror comics like Tales of the Crypt, as evidenced in the comicization of the opening credits and the closing frame. As anthologies go, it’s more interconnected than most, which works much better as a standalone feature film than most anthology shows, which tend to be strung-together shorts like a standard short story collection.

It’s a delightfully gory, gross, scary, charming horror movie that’s developed a sizable cult following (is it a cult following if it’s sizable?) and a place in the Seasonal Watching lineup for Halloween, especially since Carpenter’s Halloween isn’t necessarily my favorite movie (just personal preference) and I have to be in the right headspace to watch Zombie’s Halloween remake.

This watchalong review is designed for those who have already watched the movie, as most of my reviews are, so there will be twisty spoilers here. It’s hard to properly review the movie without addressing the twists, since anthology parts are too short not to mention their endings, and I’ve seen it so many times that I’m not sure how to write as though I haven’t seen it before. I’m just in it for the flaky layers, people–like a bloody croissant.

I may pop in and out of the scene line-up rather than going completely scene by scene, because the movie cuts from one to another story in a way that ramps up the tension really well and feels organic rather than choppy.

1) Don’t Blow Out the Jack-o-lantern, a.k.a. Meet Sam

The introduction to the anthology creates the first side of the bookend that will eventually weave all the stories together. You see characters from all of the stories passing through the frame, although we don’t know that yet, and we’re at the end of the Halloween festivities instead of the beginning. Everything’s winding down, Tahmoh’s character is silly drunk, and Leslie Bibb is done with the whole holiday.

For someone who isn’t crazy about Halloween, Emma certainly went all out for the yard decorations, I must say (as a person who loves Halloween and doesn’t decorate the yard at all… well, I did put out a really adorable Grim Reaper this year).

It’s not the most exciting of the stories, but it packs a hell of a punch at the end, with our first look at Sam and the first gruesome slaying of the one who breaks a Halloween rule, setting the tone for the rest. After Scream, you know that when someone in a horror movie mentions the rules, you gotta sit up and pay attention.

Michael Dougherty and Bryan Singer really pull no punches with their gore and gross-out, applying them with a sense of whimsy and undeniable fun for the genre, which is why I think this movie’s so well-loved in the genre. When the cast and crew are having fun, the audience can tell, and Trick ‘r Treat is just plain fun.

There’s also a nice homage to the movie Halloween in this segment.

I didn’t even know that keeping Jack-o-lanterns lit all night was a rule. Fire hazard much? If you have a plug-in or electric tea light and just keep it lit that way, does it count?

2) Always Wear a Costume, a.k.a. Peeping Tommy

The boy in the adorable bear costume also played Sam–except for the stunt work, of course.

Anna Paquin is one of those actresses I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I really like her. I think she’s just interesting to watch on screen. She has a presence and stature, and she’s memorable even when her characters aren’t. On the other hand, she always sounds like she’s not really passing in whatever accent she uses, including her own, and it’s distracting.

We set up the story with all the fairy tale references we can find, from Cinderella to Snow White to the seminal Little Red Riding Hood costume of the reluctant Laurie (Paquin). Could it possibly be relevant to the story? What about Sheep’s Meadow?

I’m awash in references.

Those are some amazing last-minute store-bought costumes, though. I mean, when was the last time Party City had something that fit that well and didn’t look like it was going to fall apart by Day of the Dead?

Cue the endless stream of sexual innuendos. They keep using them because they keep working. Nudge nudge, wink wink. No regrets.

3) Always Check Your Candy and Only Take One Piece on the Honor System, a.k.a. Barf Bag

I have to close my ears on this one every time. Vomit is right on the edge of being a hard limit for me, and this has one of the most graphic vomit scenes I’ve seen. The sounds as much as the visuals do it for me, and thank you, I’m not interested in sympathetic vomiting tonight. (Honorable mentions include the bulimia scene in Tamara and the weight loss scene in Wishmaster 3.)

But Dylan Baker, as always, is phenomenal as the serial killer, because as Wednesday Addams famously said, they look like everyone else, and no one looks more like a serial killer who looks like everyone else than Dylan Baker. He kills it (pun intended, of course) with his comedic timing in dealing with the foibles and pitfalls of being a single father to an adorable moppet who just wants to spend time with his father and trying to successfully bury the bodies without his asshole neighbor finding out. No one has suffered how he suffers.

WHY ARE ALL YOUR KNIVES DULL, PRINCIPAL WILKINS? WHY?

But Wilkins really stabs into the heart of Trick ‘r Treat like the Grinch puts the spirit into Christmas. We have all these traditions, all the rules, to protect us from evil, but no one respects the old traditions anymore and therefore must die. Seems like that escalated quickly, but hey, this is Halloween, this is Halloween, Halloween, Halloween… Wrong movie.

I’m not drunk. It’s just been a long week, and next week is going to be just as long.

Trusty Sam is here to make sure people keep the Sam in Samhain and to remind people why we have these traditions. Sam doesn’t want to carve you up, everyone. He just wants his trick ‘r treat candy.

Is little Billy an homage to Chucky? Because although he’s not wearing a Good Guy costume, his overalls and striped shirt with his mop of ginger hair really harken back to the doll.

4) Halloween Pranks are Fine, but Save Sadism for When You’re Older, a.k.a. Halloween Queen

Those kids really capture the horror of seeing your teachers outside the classroom context. Talk about a rude awakening.

Right up there with the whimsical gore, Trick ‘r Treat doesn’t hold back on child endangerment and death. No one is safe, even if your frontal lobes aren’t fully developed yet. Sam’s just a child, too. An ancient child, but a child nonetheless, and age won’t spare you if you break the rules and disrespect the holiday. No one messes with a Rhonda’s special interest, from which we get that it’s pronounced Sow-en, not Sam-hine, so we all learned something today to lord over everyone else.

Ms. Henderson briefly turns up at Sheep’s Hollow–you see her rolling the horny hot dog toward the fire.

Rhonda’s witch costume and Jack-o-lantern game is strong. I’m still getting serious fire hazard vibes, though.

5) Don’t Wander Off Alone, a.k.a. Watch Out for Monsters

Mysterious dark stranger in a mask and a cloak. The whole scene is sexy as hell, which makes who the stranger is such a twist, because that girl’s he’s got is a total ten.

I want to know where he got his vamp teeth, though, because they’re sharp enough that she didn’t notice she was being bitten and good enough to bite through skin without breaking.

Laurie searches for the man she wants to be her First. She just wants it to be special. But everyone’s already paired up, leaving her to walk through the parade all by her lonesome. Her big sister tries to hook her up with a man dressed in a baby costume–the same guy who played the the Great Child in Th13teen Ghosts!

The mysterious dark stranger intrigues, as mysterious dark strangers do.

6) Halloween Pranks cont.

The story of the kids from the school bus is just sad, sick, cruel, and I don’t know whether it crosses a line or not, because as shown in psych ward horror as well, we as human beings have historically been terrible people to the vulnerable.

Continuing the tradition on Rhonda, the Halloween Queen, is also sad, sick, cruel. Sam ensures that vigilante justice is served with julienne fries.

The vintage masks on those kids are the creepiest, especially the paper bag mask. I love cheap thrills.

Is Rhonda’s pumpkin carving of Freddy Krueger or Tom Waits? I’m thoroughly amused that I can’t tell.

If you’re a nineties girl, you had a pair of shoes like Rhonda’s. You just did.

You made Rhonda cry, and you snuffed out the last Jack-o-lantern. For that–mostly for Rhonda–you must pay.

7) Don’t Wander cont.

Little Red Riding Hood walking alone through the woods. A little on the nose, but shorts don’t really have time for subtlety, and the twist, while somewhat predictable, makes the bludgeon of the fairy tale work, because if there’s anything I love more than a fairy tale trope, it’s a subverted one. Bonus if it’s horror.

The mysterious stranger appears again to prey upon the lost little girl. Then the stranger’s body abruptly drops in Sheep’s Hollow, his leg broken. And the best twist of all, he’s ordinary serial killer Principal Steven Wilkins, who gets to be Laurie’s first.

Her first kill, that is.

Little Red Riding Hood is secretly the wolf. All of the women in Sheep’s Hollow are. Predictable, yes. Delicious, still.

Marilyn Manson’s “Sweet Dreams” cover is a polarizing one. It’s almost definitely overused, but like She Wants Revenge’s “Tear You Apart,” it’s overused because it’s so damn cinematically effective. I could listen to both of them over and over and over again. And “Sweet Dreams” provides the perfect soundtrack for one of the better werewolf transformation sequences in cinema. First the girls take off their clothes, then they take off their skins. It’s bloody fantastic.

8) Always Give Out Candy, a.k.a. Razors in the Chocolate

At my house, we don’t get a lot of trick-or-treaters, and now that we have a dog heavily into guarding, it’s just better for everyone if we turn off the porch lights and don’t give out candy, even when we aren’t in the middle of a pandemic. So I’ve broken many of these rules and I’m still here. Except now I’ve put it out into the world that I break the rules, so maybe my luck won’t hold out.

The candy Kreeg takes from the trick-or-treaters he scares from his house is from Principal Wilkins. The first candy bar he eats is the poisoned one that kills the first kid, which is why he puts it down in disgust. The one Sam uses as a box cutter because of the razor blade inside is also from Wilkins. And the pumpkins Sam conjures to Kreeg’s house are Rhonda’s.

In spite of the best Easter eggs, this is my least favorite story, in spite of the presence of Brian Cox and the longest sequence with Sam in it. It took me a while to realize it was because it feels too familiar.

It’s basically Home Alone, but Halloween.

9) The End

Now we have context for all the interconnections that converge before Emma gets it.

There are lots of other interconnections throughout the movie, of course, but we end where we begin.

Thus ends another Halloween.

Hope you enjoyed yourself!

Time for NaNoWriMo. No rest for the wicked.

REVIEW: Silent Hill

31 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by amandamblake in Movie Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

alice krige, female-led, halloween, hellscape, horror, jodelle ferland, laurie holden, movie review, radha mitchell, sean bean, silent hill, video game

Silent_Hill_film_poster[Warning: Here there be spoilers]

I agonized over what movie I would review for Halloween. I wanted it to be one of my favorites, one I really liked. The Descent? A 1408/Oculus double feature (because yes, they go together)? American Mary? Candyman? I ultimately decided on Silent Hill, one of the first movies I saw during my freshman year of college, when I started watching R-rated horror and really got on the horror train. (Yes, I waited until I was seventeen. Yes, I am that person.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m prone to really like my early introductions to things, because that’s before I get jaded. But despite the fact it’s not a perfect film, Silent Hill was surprisingly good, especially for a video game to movie adaptation. Although from what I hear, if you’re going to do a VG2M horror adaptation, Silent Hill is the one to go to. I’ve never played the games myself. I’m too prone to habitual behavior for me to trust myself around video games. So I don’t have any expectations of someone who’s played the game, but the movie pushes so many of my personal buttons. It wasn’t a critical darling, and I can tell why. It’s monster-dense, melodramatic, and as stories go, not very original. But for me it’s less about originality (although that’s nice, too) and more about execution. It may be derivative, but is it a good story? Am I entertained for the night? Am I satisfied? Can I watch it over and over and over again and never get tired of it? Silent Hill is one of those films for me.

This is as much a contemplative retrospective as it is a review. Okay, it’s just me rewatching the movie and geeking out. Bear with me.

One of the most wonderful things about this movie is that the cast was originally so woman-heavy, they had to give Sean Bean a somewhat extraneous side plot just to make men feel included. And it’s one of those rare Sean Bean roles in which he doesn’t die, so… But the movie is a powerhouse of female roles with actresses known for genre films. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

Despite being a generally misogynistic genre, horror also historically has these huge, powerful roles for women, especially with the Final Girl trope. But Silent Hill and The Descent, both movies with a majority female cast, are both in my top ten list of favorite movies, with layered, nuanced characters and all different kinds of strength. What’s more, while many of these women are sexy and beautiful, because Hollywood, the movies and their strength don’t derive from those qualities. Or rather, to me, the sexiness comes from the fact their strength isn’t from sex but from character and determination, if that makes sense.

We begin with Radha Mitchell, who is a wonderful, solid leading lady. One of the things you might keep an eye on in subsequent viewings is how her main outfit changes over the course of the movie. It’s supposed to be the same outfit, but the colors subtly change from scene to scene to fit the hue and mood and transitions during the movie. Props to the costume department for coming up with so many forms of the same outfit and making it feel seamless. (Another trivia side note, this is supposed to take place in West Virginia, but it was shot in Canada, which means a certain percentage of the cast needs to be local, so there are all these Canadian accents here and there. It’s a little hilarious, especially when the script has more regional dialogue.)

Mitchell’s character, Rose, and Bean’s character, Christopher, are searching for their daughter Sharon, who’s sleepwalked far from home, screaming “Silent Hill!” when they try to wake her up. This prompts Rose’s research into her adoptive daughter’s origin in the ghost town Silent Hill–a former coal town rendered uninhabitable by a fire–and her plan to secretly take Sharon to Silent Hill to see why she has these terrible night terrors and somnambulism episodes.

Seems like a wonderful plan.

Sharon is played by at-the-time child actress Jodelle Ferland, who’d already dipped her toes into horror by the time she did something as mainstream and big budget as Silent Hill. She was around ten or eleven during filming, and she was still a small girl, but some of her lines suggest that she was supposed to be playing younger, and it doesn’t always land well, maybe because she’s using a little girl voice in her higher register to contrast with the lower Alessa voice. She’s a convincing kid, but there’s a maturity to her that doesn’t really fit the age I felt she was playing. It works when she’s Alessa but not always as Sharon. Still, there’s a reason this girl keeps playing the devil. She’s very good at old-young, which is part of the reason she’s one of the inspirations behind my Snow White character, though she’d now be too old for the role. Nevertheless, her work in Silent Hill has led to me watching her career, and I’m rooting for her as she transitions into adult roles.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. One semi-abduction, police car chase, and car crash later, Rose wakes up on the edge of Silent Hill, surrounded by dense fog and ash floating from the sky like snow. Since I’m not familiar with the games, a lot of these atmospheric elements are new to me, and extremely effective. It’s a beautiful, muted visual. I’m a sucker for pretty horror, and Silent Hill has a lot of pretty and ugly-pretty horror for my needy little eyes. Among all the ash, Sharon is nowhere to be found, thus beginning the scavenger hunt portion of the movie.

I’m being flippant, but it’s actually a good conflict–mother seeking daughter and willing to do anything to find her and keep her safe–and that conflict plus a lot of what follows pays plenty of homage to the video games without feeling too much like one. Finding what’s lost is a classic video game device, and it works just as well in more linear storytelling. It’s basically an ‘into the woods’ quest, with all kinds of monsters and allies along the way.

Once in Silent Hill, Rose quickly discovers that this town is not normal. In Ash Mode, it’s just haunting, unsettling. But Rose follows what she thinks is Sharon into a warehouse. That’s when the emergency siren goes off, and the Ash world flakes away to reveal a hellish interior. It’s a pretty, darn good effect, and I’m not usually a fan of CGI. In Hell Mode (or Rust Mode), that’s when the monsters really come out to play. In the warehouse, it’s the Gray Children, which look like misshapen burning babies. Here’s where the CGI loses it a bit for me. People should be people whenever possible, because anything less than the best motion capture doesn’t move like living things actually move. In the special features of the DVD, I watched the green screen where a small female contortionist donned her Gray Child costume and moved around in it, and that’s honestly creepier for me. Upon another viewing, I think it’s because the proportion of the Gray Children to Rose keeps changing, which jars me out of the suspension of disbelief. However, the Gray Child was my least favorite CGI monster in the movie. All the others are better.

(When the Gray Children scene ends with everything flaking back into Ash Mode, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” plays on a jukebox in the bowling alley. Everyone in the original theater laughed; good release of tension, and the only funny bit in the movie.)

After the more neutral Ash Mode (I’m sure there’s an actual name for these modes in the video game, but I don’t want to look them up at the moment) returns, Rose runs into Dahlia, a Miss Havisham-meets-Cassandra type character in the movies, although I understand she’s more of an antagonist in the games. Here, she’s the sorrowful mother, a broken woman heavy with cobwebs, dust, and regret, played by the gently altoed Deborah Kara Unger. She chews the scenery in a wonderfully maudlin way and gives us the first bit of exposition about Alessa, the child that was taken from her. When Rose shows her a locket with Sharon’s picture, Dahlia becomes agitated and insists it’s Alessa, her own child.

As Rose continues to look for Sharon and for a way out of Silent Hill, which seems completely cut off from the rest of the world–literally, with the streets out of town broken away and nothing but an abyss on every side–she runs into the cop that chased her into the town, Sybil Bennett, played by genre royalty Laurie Holden.

From what I can tell, people either love her or find her annoying. Silent Hill was my first introduction to her, and I won’t lie. When she first pulled off her helmet and started shooting at the Armless Man (much creepier than the Gray Child), I developed a serious crush on this woman, hardass cop notwithstanding. Sure, it seems ridiculous to us for Cybil to handcuff Rose with everything that’s happening, but as far as Cybil knows, she’s followed a parent kidnapper into Silent Hill, and it wouldn’t be the first (which is a nod to one of the games, apparently).

At this point, the Sean Bean side plot makes it perfectly clear that the ashy Silent Hill isn’t just cut off, it’s a completely different dimension existing parallel to the real Silent Hill, where it’s pouring down rain and police are searching for Rose, Sharon, and Cybil. Through the inspector on the case, we’re given a little more exposition about what happened to Alessa and to the town. But on their side, it’s just a normal ghost town–singed, smoky, dangerous due to the coal fires still burning and sending fumes up to the surface, but otherwise normal. When Rose is at her most distressed, Christopher senses her, which leads to a so-close-yet-so-far moment that I think played pretty well. Extraneous though it may be, I feel like the side plot does provide a much-needed atmosphere respite from the fantasy-horror Silent Hill world. The doses of reality offer enough of a contrast that the hellscape seems all the more hellish.

Rose follows the clues left behind for her by the child she keeps thinking is Sharon running away from her, all the way to a school marked by a curious-looking cross. Inside, there’s evidence that Alessa was decried as a witch even by the children and that something obscene happened to her by a janitor named Colin, given what this hell universe tends to do to the people who hurt her. Colin is dead, wrapped and contorted with barbed wire, and in his mouth is something Rose needed to find, a hotel key. But before Rose can leave, she discovers men in coal miner gear outside the bathroom. Their canary goes crazy right before the emergency siren goes off and Hell Mode returns, bringing Colin’s dead, desecrated body to life.

This is one of those cases where practical effects really paid off, and it’s no wonder that the same man who plays Colin is also the one who played Pyramid Head. He does amazing pantomime work, conveying so much with body language in roles where he doesn’t speak. Just as Pyramid Head is a pretty undeniable symbol of uniquely male violence (noticeable especially within a majority female cast), his Colin is a tortured obscenity. The artistry in his dual performances is a pleasure to watch.

With the cockroach-like Creepers and Pyramid Head after her in the rusty, bloody hellscape, Rose finally meets up with Cybil again, who can’t deny there’s something rotten in the state of Silent Hill. As soon as Ash Mode returns and most of the monster danger is gone, they continue following the clues the girl who looks like Sharon left behind, all the way to a hotel. The music they use on their way reminds me that I love the soundtrack of the movie, which borrows themes from a number of the games. It’s a great industrial sound that translates well to the movie.

At the hotel, we finally get a good look at Alessa, who’s the spitting image of Sharon except for the dark hair and school uniform. And we meet one of the first fundamentalists left over from the fire. They’re a sect off of Christianity, with theology built around witch-burning and maintaining purity in the community. In the case of Anna and most of the other members of the congregation, this is where the story tends to turn overwrought and overly simplistic. The only grounding influence is the cult leader Christabella, played by the wonderfully hypnotic Alice Krige, another member of genre royalty. Have I mentioned how stellar this cast is?

And how unique is it that this fundamentalist cult is run by a soft-spoken, steely woman instead of a charismatic man? What could have turned into something laughable is given a more solid foundation by Christabella, who is clearly a true believer of her own religion (also unusual in cult movies, where the man is clearly a con using his charisma to gain power and respect). She may be an antagonist and an evil person, but I respect true believers more than cons, and she has no reason to believe she’s wrong–after all, their people have remained safe, and the church remains a refuge from the darkness whenever Hell Mode settles over the town.

This fact alone raises a number of questions for me that are never answered. It’s clear that if Alessa hadn’t been burned as a witch, Silent Hill would never have been sucked into a hellscape by the demon that Alessa accepted inside of her, so Christabella is clearly the author of her own people’s destruction. But it’s curious that people portrayed as evil, as those who have twisted faith into something ugly and vicious, can still keep the demon at bay in their church. It’s curious that the church is still a sanctuary from the darkness. Demon!Alessa calls it ‘blind conviction’ that keeps her from entering, but is it really? Or does their ugly faith come with enough good intentions that it affords them some protection? Why would a demon not be able to enter everywhere in her own hell? Is their illusion of protection as much a part of the hellscape as their illusion of righteousness? They certainly don’t seem to be happy with either.

So many questions unanswered, but I’m not one to think that something a plot hole just because it doesn’t have an answer. I’d like to think that things are more complicated than good and evil, even in heaven and hell.

Once in the church, Rose and Cybil are questioned by Christabella, but despite some reservations and suspicion on both sides, Christabella agrees to take them to where the demon waits and might have answers about how to find Sharon. However, when Christabella discovers that Sharon looks like Alessa, she tries to stop the two women. Cybil sacrifices herself to the fanatics to let Rose continue down into the center of the hellscape, where we encounter the sexiest of the monsters, the iconic Dark Nurses. This is one of the places where the movie feels more like a video game, but it doesn’t suffer from comparison. Instead, it helps build the tension, and the fact that all the nurses are made-up people really helps bring the realism to the moment that too much CGI would have destroyed.

Then we enter the realm of pure exposition where we learn the full story behind Alessa, Sharon, and what happened to Silent Hill. We still have questions: Why does the inspector look the same thirty years ago as today? Who’s Alessa’s father? Why was some of Silent Hill sucked into hell and not everyone? How much of what the demon says can we believe? And again, why can’t the demon enter the church without being brought in? What caused Silent Hill to become a ghost town–the fire that burned Alessa or the demon sucking most of Silent Hill down into its hell? Because I originally thought it was the fire, but Alessa was put into a Silent Hill hospital. Ghost towns don’t happen overnight, but if the fire caused the coal mines to burn, one would think it would have been pretty quick. Maybe these answers were lost in editing. They’re ultimately irrelevant to the story, but curious minds still want to know.

The story reaches the climax back at the church, where the fundamentalists–miserable, judgmental murderers that they are–receive what seems like just deserts. The only quibble I have is Christabella’s fate, which seems gratuitously sexual to me. Don’t get me wrong, the whole movie is graphically violent, sometimes beautifully so. Brutal beatings, a woman skinned alive, torture totems, the burning of Alessa and Cybil, the Dark Nurses… I just felt that Christabella’s fate could have been more poetry and less rape. Please.

The weakest parts of even good horror movies tend to fall at the end. Sometimes I like Silent Hill‘s ending and sometimes I don’t. Ambiguity is a horror movie maker’s friend, but it often leads to a frustrated audience. Then again, a solid, safe ending can hit a supernatural rather than a horror note, which can be a bit jarring, and a dark ending can be kind of despairing. It’s really difficult for horror movies to win.

TL;DR: Silent Hill is a badass, female-dominated, visually horrific and stunning movie–far from a masterpiece, but in my opinion, a solid offering and one I don’t mind rewatching on the regular. The sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation, is a hot mess. I enjoy it and it has some good moments, but it’s a mess. I feel like a good Silent Hill sequel could be made, but I doubt it ever will. The original manages to stand strong, strange, and horrifying all on its own.

Trypophobia

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by amandamblake in Music, Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

disease, fear, halloween, holes, horror, lyrics, not a poet, parasitosis, poem, songwriting, trypophobia

abstract art background bamboo

Photo by Suvan Chowdhury on Pexels.com

I’ve been saving this one for October, because it’s all about trypohobia, the fear of little holes where they shouldn’t be (see Lotus Pods, because there isn’t a photo in the free media library). There’s a theory that it arises from an atavistic fear of the visible symptoms of disease and parasites (see Delusional Parasitosis). Writing a song to invoke the discomfort of the phenomenon was a blast. I should write horror songs more often.

TRYPOPHOBIA

Thin threads hollow in the darkness
Cities and paths kept under the surface
Chewing their way through wooden bones
Insidious underneath skinful homes

Tiny pinpricks all in rows
Pulling from hundreds of little shadows
Slick long bodies and gnawing maws
The ones inside you never saw

Chorus:
Wriggle, squirm, scream, writhe
A pox upon the lotus eye
Itch and scratch, tearing cry
You never know what lies inside

Flowers and pods on riddled skin
Crawling and feeding deep within
Black eyes and mouths, open in wait
Death in moments, disease in their wake.

The hive mind, hive of the flesh
A soul decayed, mind in distress
Is prickling there or is it not?
Don’t you wish they’d stayed in the dark?

Chorus

Patterns of sick, patterns of harm
From deep within pores, from doors unarmed
Digging holes in your perception
Dare see death in your reflection.

Chorus

Nocturne/Halloween Playlist

28 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Soundtracks

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

fan soundtrack, halloween, horror, inspiration, nightmare, nocturne, novel

coverBetween trying to finish a writing project, wrestling with ideas that keep coming to me, finalizing Nocturne for self-publication, preparing for NaNoWriMo, and dealing with a seriously brutal episode of depression, let’s just say it’s been quiet around here.

So I thought I’d give you something to listen to.

Usually, around this time of year, I’m listening to my Halloween playlist round the clock, but for some reason, my brain just wants to listen to Legally Blonde: The Musical over and over and over again, with the occasional side of Sara Bareilles’ Brave Enough or Lady Gaga’s Artpop. At least Delain’s Moonbathers and Nightwish’s Imaginaerium also get an honorable mention—they have good atmosphere.

However, when I’m working on Nocturne, I crave the playlist I created for it. When I wrote the first draft, that was before I had iTunes or an iPod and still played my CDs on a boombox, but I was writing at night, so I had to write in silence. But since then, I’ve amassed a fairly solid fan soundtrack (can the author be a fan?) that set the mood for rewrites and edits, with songs that sometimes reminded me so strongly of elements in the story that it was kind of scary.

It just so happens that, since Nocturne is a horror novel, the playlist would do wonderfully as a Halloween set. So if you want to grab a few of these from your music library of choice for Halloween or if you want to prepare for Nocturne the way your humble author does, here’s my curated playlist. (I tried to make sure an artist wasn’t featured more than three times.)

“Asleep” – Emilie Autumn
“Avalanche” – Epica
“Cold Caress” – Sirenia
“Coma White (acoustic)” – Marilyn Manson
“Crushed Dreams” – Tristania
“Dark Shines” – Muse
“Dead Boy’s Poem” – Nightwish
“Dead is the New Alive” – Emilie Autumn
“End of the Dream” – Evanescence
“Enjoy the Silence” – Lacuna Coil
“The Essence of Silence” – Epica
“Fallen Star” – Kamelot
“Fate” – Tristania
“Haunted” – Evanescence
“Here’s to the Fall” – Kamelot
“I Know Where You Sleep” – Emilie Autumn
“I Make the Mistake” – Mortal Love
“I’ll See You in Your Dreams” – Moonspell
“Insomnia” – Kamelot
“It’s the Fear” – Within Temptation
“Lights” – Ellie Goulding
“The Lonely” – Christina Perri
“Lost” – Within Temptation
“Lotus” – Tristania
“Loverman” – Nick Cave
“Me” – Paula Cole
“Monster” – Panzer AG
“Not Alone” – Sara Bareilles
“People are Strange” – Johnny Hollow
“A Song to Say Goodbye” – Placebo
“Restless” – Within Temptation
“Sleepwalkers Dream” – Delain
“Suffocating Right” – Neuroticfish
“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” – Marilyn Manson
“Tear You Apart” – She Wants Revenge
“Turn the Lights Out” – Delain
“Uninvited” – Alanis Morissette
“Virtue and Vice” – Delain
“Whispers in the Dark” – Skillet
“World of Glass” – Tristania

Also, if you’re interested in my Pinterest board for Nocturne, you can find it here. I think I created it sometime after the first major rewrite, and it’s been lovely visual atmosphere inspo for all subsequent edits. If you like those creepy illustrations from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, you’ll like the board.

Cover Reveal – Nocturne

25 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Novels

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cover by combs, cover reveal, gothic, halloween, horror, nightmare, nocturne, young adult

cover

I’m shooting for a Halloween release at this point. It’s no gimmick. That’s really just the way it’s turned out.

Shout out to the fabulous Covers by Combs for the custom cover design and formatting.

It’s been eight years since the car accident that stole Callie’s voice and plagued her with terrifying nightmares every night. Four years since her family wrote her off as a lost cause and abandoned her at a boarding school for troubled teens. Despite friction with some of the other residents, seventeen-year-old Callie has nevertheless thrived in a place where they don’t expect her to be normal, but she’s not sure she’s able to thrive anywhere else.

Then one night, a man who calls himself the Guardian pulls her into a subterranean world filled with all the monsters from her dreams and ruled by the Night Mare herself. Down in the darklands, Callie’s nightmarish creations worship her. Down in the darklands, she isn’t tired or sick or hungry.

Down in the darklands, she can speak.

As her waking life deteriorates under the weight of exhaustion and other complications, Callie’s nightly forays into the nightmare world also begin to take their toll. And it’s getting harder to tell which world is really the nightmare.

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

NOW AVAILABLE

WHERE IT ALL BEGINS

TINGLE YOUR SPINE

What I Write About

  • A Few Thoughts
  • Movie Reviews
  • Music
  • Novels
  • Poetry
  • Series
  • Soundtracks
  • Television
  • This Land
  • Thorns
  • Uncategorized
  • Writing

Archives

  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • October 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017

Website Built with WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×