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Amanda M. Blake

~ Of fairy tales and tentacles

Amanda M. Blake

Tag Archives: mental illness

Writing Through the Apocalypse

14 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by amandamblake in Series, Thorns, Writing

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2012, apocalypse, fairy tale, mental illness, Series, thanatophobia, Thorns, Writing

aerial photography of pine trees

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

The year 2012 was a rough one for me. If I remember correctly, I was taking online courses and no longer working at the time, which was amazing, and going forward, I will ever pursue a similar state. But I was also dealing with a level of anxiety and fear that has only been matched post-2016 election, and for much the same reason.

I’m what’s called a thanatophobe. Roughly translated, it means afraid of death. Now, that would describe most people, right? Fear of death is normal and part of the survival instinct. There’s something fundamentally disturbing about being snuffed out, of the world continuing on without you, even though you accept perfectly well that the world got along fine before you were born, too. Your consciousness just can’t comprehend not being a consciousness. That’s why you wake up from dreams when you die–or that’s the theory, anyway. It’s all very mirror-in-a-mirror.

I do have what I consider a higher level of normal death anxiety. Hypochondria is a side effect of that, as is the mysophobia that’s been slowly but steadily increasing for a while. Uncertainty and control freakishness play a big part.

But I also have an occasionally paralyzing fear of apocalypse. All kinds of apocalypses. If there’s been a disaster movie about it, I’m afraid of it–although, strangely, I love disaster movies. Natural apocalypses. Alien apocalypses. Supernatural apocalypses. The Rapture. The Yellowstone caldera eruption. Asteroid hurtling toward Earth. Nuclear war. Rapid climate change. Epidemic. (Honestly, every time I read THE STAND, I get a cold. I think the publisher puts something in the pages.)

And yes, the 2012 Mayan calendar ending that marked the end of the world as we know it.

Did I know that, while natural and nuclear apocalypses are quite possible (as my brain reminds me all the time), this one was complete bunk, and nothing was going to happen in 2012 just because it was 2012, and the world was definitely not going to end on exactly December 21, 2012? Absolutely. I knew this for a fact. Just like I knew that the Rapture wasn’t going to happen according to Harold Camping’s predictions. Did that stop me from being afraid of it? No. That’s why they call it a phobia, Carl. It’s utterly irrational. And it was the entire freaking year. December 21 was at the end of it, after all.

So to distract myself, I wrote THORNS, which ended up about 195K words in its first draft. (I write long, then cut. That’s my very frustrating process.)

Of course, it helped that I was pretty much the only one freaking out and everyone was else was basically chill, so there were a lot of ports in the storm. Post-2016, not so much, which is why creativity has been such a hard thing for a lot of artists of late, although I’m noticing an upswing. Fear fatigue, maybe?

THORNS actually arose from a short story I’d wanted to write during college four years earlier. The opportunity came up in my fairy tales class–yes, I had a literature class on fairy tales. Envy me. Among a few other options, our final assignment could be a retold fairy tale, so I sat down and put to paper the idea I’d had for this BEAUTY AND THE BEAST retelling I was dying to write.

First thing I realized upon writing it was that it was too long for a short story–around 11K. The second thing I realized was that the story was still much too short and didn’t work at all as it was. It needed to become a novel to do the concept justice, so I shelved it until I thought I could handle a more elaborate plot. I wrote a much shorter BEAUTY AND THE BEAST retelling for the purpose of the assignment and moved on with my life, working on other projects. Most of which I also shelved, because that was the period in my life that I was really Learning How to Write by writing well-conceived crap. I’ll probably rework some of it someday.

Enter the apocalypse.

I’d say I just needed some escapist fiction, but THORNS isn’t really escapist. What it offered me, however, was a full, rich, detailed world in which I could hide among plot complexities (I’m a logistics person, so the problem-solving aspect of plotting is my wheelhouse) as well as hang out with people who were much more interesting to be around than my anxiety-ridden head. As long as my mind was racing, I thought I might as well put it to better use.

About halfway through this monster of a novel, I realized one book wasn’t going to cut it. Because of course.

But that’s the beauty of it (seriously, I’m not trying to be fairy tale puntastic). I can always come back to the THORNS series. When I do, I know it’s going to take up time and brainpower and spoons. But it’s going to do so in a way that I very much need, so it’s a good thing I’ve planned at least seven books in advance, and in my spare moments at work, I try to think beyond that. I told myself I couldn’t publish the second book, ROSE RED, until I’d written the fourth, PUPPETEER. Now that I’ve more or less figured out a work/writing balance, I’m thrilled next year will finally see me tackle it. (If we’re still here. Just saying.)

Haven’t figured out a work/writing/life balance, but you can’t have everything. And if you can’t have everything and the world is going to hell in a sound bite, I plan to do it writing.

The line in HAMILTON that sticks with me daily is “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”

Because I fucking am. And I’ve got shit to finish before then. I guess death is a great motivator.

Would rather not work in a constant state of low-level panic, but I’ll take what I can get.

P.S. Editing through the apocalypse works, too.

REVIEW: The Awakening

25 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by amandamblake in Movie Reviews

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depression, ghosts, grief, horror, mental illness, movie, movie review, rebecca hall, the awakening

The Awakening

I think ghost stories are particularly difficult to make scary. They’re generally filed under the umbrella of horror monsters, but they’re more often tragic than frightening. That’s why there are so many ghost horror movies that depend on the jump scare—because that’s sometimes the only kinds of scares they offer. Let’s face it – the more you get to know them, the more lost spirits seem sad rather than scary (SIXTH SENSE kind of covers this phenomenon, and I’d consider SIXTH SENSE one of the better ghost horror movies). I think this is the reason a lot of movie hauntings have transitioned from the human spirits to the demonic. Ghost stories are extremely difficult to do well, especially when trying to find the right balance of tragedy and horror.

THE AWAKENING is one of my favorite ghost stories, but it is, without question, a better tragedy than it is a horror movie. I would say the closest comparison to the movie in tone, palette, and time period is THE OTHERS, which is also one of the better ghost horror movies. However, while THE AWAKENING has a few jump scares, it’s really shot as a drama rather than a horror movie most of the way through, which is good, because aside from some good tension here and there, it functions much better as a supernatural period drama.

I love the opening to THE AWAKENING. It begins with a quote from the main character’s book challenging the spiritualism movement prevalent at the beginning of the 20th by placing it in historical context. Between the Spanish flu and World War I, so many had lost people close to them under terrible circumstances. In the midst of survivor’s guilt, lack of closure, and an excess of grief. Florence Cathcart rightly points out, “This is a time for ghosts.”

The opening transitions into a classic seance, with the supernatural element rising higher and higher…only for Florence to interrupt the proceedings by exposing the spiritualist charlatans for what they are. Instead of being outraged at being taken advantage of, a woman who lost her young daughter – presumably to influenza – slaps Florence and asks whether she has any children. “No, of course you haven’t,” she replies with disdain, because a woman with children would know why a false dream was better than nothing. She questions whether Florence’s grief for the young soldier whose photograph she brought to the seance was even real. But as the mother leaves, we see Florence—played by the wonderful Rebecca Hall with arch strength and vulnerability—deflate. Her commanding, energetic presence dissipates. She appears weighed down, barely able to take another step.

In her own words, “This is a time for ghosts.” And it’s clear within the first fifteen minutes that, though Florence devotes herself to disproving hauntings and exposing frauds, she’s desperately seeking ghosts of her own. It gives her no pleasure at all to debunk the supernatural. Quite the contrary.

This entire movie offers some of the best depictions of depression and grief from a number of the characters that I think I’ve ever seen in a movie. The way it weighs you down and you sometimes don’t even want to move. The way it makes people lash out. The way you have to put on a mask, the way you lie to others and yourself, the way it takes over your life and cycles through your thoughts, the guilt, hopelessness, and self-destruction it can cause.

From the wonderful opening, AWAKENING moves into the main plot, with Robert Mallory—played by Dominic West as an attractive but caustic ex-soldier—an instructor from a boy’s boarding school, visiting Cathcart and requesting her help to put to rest rumors of a ghost boy haunting the school, after the death of one of the students. Usually the man would be the skeptic and the woman the believer, but like Mulder and Scully, AWAKENING switches that expectation on its head. Mallory believes in ghosts, but he’s also a firm realist, and he only wants the truth and to keep the kids safe, and the prim but earnest school matron, Maud, is a devotee of Cathcart’s work and recommended her.

At first, Cathcart is reluctant to engage in another investigation, weary as she is with her depression and needing a break, but Mallory throws her own words from her book back into her face, about how she was a fearful child and cannot abide children being made to live in fear – another point that resonates through the movie.

The boys’ school to which Mallory brings Florence is appropriately gothic, a looming, gray structure in the middle of nowhere, gloomy and forbidding, with energetic but somewhat melancholy students and a severe administration. With her, Florence brings the various accoutrements of her trade—a delightful look into the early twentieth century versions of our modern ghost-hunting gizmos, with all the scientific rigor of pre-WWII CSI. The dark manor at night provides some decent spookiness, but it’s pretty clear with the first tripped bell wire and footprints on the floor that the ghost boy traversing through the halls at that late hour is not so dead, and the tension dissipates…until something’s there that shouldn’t be.

And thus begins the slow unraveling of Ms. Cathcart. The most held-together characters of the movie lose their masks, exposing not ghosts but shells, broken survivors of any number of tragedies who must learn how to live with the ghosts of the people who passed on without them, and beyond the fear of mortality so keenly felt at a time that wrought the need for ghosts.

To be honest, the supernatural elements are sometimes the worst parts of the movie – the swirly face ghost is actually the worst effect, which is a shame, because that’s one of the few things you’re supposed to be afraid of.

The human elements – shattering perceptions and confronting fears – are by far the most interesting parts. I feel like I see something new every time I watch it. It’s a beautiful film and a beautiful, tragic story, and I do encourage you to give it a try on that merit rather than the horror.

Review: LIGHTS OUT

25 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Movie Reviews

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depression, horror, lights out, mama, mental illness, psychosis, the babadook

lights_out_2016_posterWhen I saw that David Sandberg’s amazing short was going to be made into a full-length movie, I was wary, especially since the trailers underwhelmed. But horror trailers often do, and the same director of the short would direct the full-length. I heard mixed reviews from friends, but as easy an audience as I am, I thought I’d give it a try.

I’ll start out by saying that the original short film is a hundred times better. WATCH IT. It accomplishes more in two minutes and thirty seconds than the full-length accomplishes in eighty minutes.

The film shares a lot of beats with another short-to-full-length movie that wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be—MAMA (which I’ve grown to like much better as magical realism rather than horror)—but it tries more to compare itself to THE BABADOOK (also short-to-full-length), with its dark, Nosferatu-fingered nemesis and mental illness analogies. However, everywhere BABADOOK succeeds, LIGHTS OUT sadly fails, suffering all the more from the comparison. Maria Bello and especially Billy Burke were poorly used in a movie with such uncertain footing and logic potholes. All actors did their best, but the material proved too shallow and on-the-nose for them to do much.

Let’s begin with the logic potholes: If there’s one thing that writers of magic learn, it’s that you can make up your rules, but there still have to be rules. There has to be an internal logic to the supernatural, or else you’re cheating. There were plenty of problems with the logic to Diana’s character. If she was a manifestation of depression, why introduce us to her life prior to the mental institution to challenge that? SPOILER Given that Diana’s father killing himself didn’t remove Diana’s influence, was it the fact she was a ghost that allowed it to work this time? Which makes no sense whatsoever, since she’s dead and even more likely to go on attaching to people? And if she wasn’t dead and just transfigured, that still doesn’t explain why Maria Bello’s Sophie could shoot herself and destroy Diana in the process when it didn’t work for Diana’s father.

The movie had no clue as to whether Diana was a physical being who couldn’t exist in the light, which hurt her, and could move fast enough to avoid it or whether she was an apparition who disappeared in the light. She was one, then the other, and it just didn’t work. Figure out your rules, people, and work from there.

The best scene in the movie was the opening one, which most closely resembled the original short, and of course it borrowed the original actress, which was a nice nod, plus Billy Burke. After his unfortunate encounter with Diana, the movie deteriorates from there.

We’re introduced to supposedly-wayward-girl Becca and her boy-toy-who-wants-more boyfriend Lucas, plus young-boy-taking-on-too-much-as-child-of-mentally-ill-mother Martin. We don’t get much more than those hyphenations, unfortunately, and while Teresa Palmer tries so hard to play disaffected, troubled teen sister, Jessica Chastain did it much better as an adult in MAMA. The movie rests on Palmer’s back, but that’s not quite sound enough a foundation.

Which brings us to the mental illness analogy, where LIGHTS OUT tries to make lightning strike twice after the resounding success of THE BABADOOK. In both cases, the comparison is at time heavy-handed, but the emotional resonance of THE BABADOOK makes it work whether the analogy is obvious or subtle. LIGHTS OUT works best when the analogy is casual, but the areas where it’s heavy-handed (“Have you been taking your meds?”—words every single person suffering with mental illness absolutely hates) establish the horror mythology as a direct comparison. That left the movie open to explore potentially amazing horror/mental illness analogies, but it made huge missteps and came to outright terrible conclusions.

There were suggestions that our wayward-girl Becca saw and suffered under Diana in her youth, the way that children of people with mental illness can be tormented by their parent’s disease. And it can lead to children of those with mental illness abandoning their parents out of resentment and for their own safety. But while THE BABADOOK aptly made a comparison with depression that shifts into the psychotic, LIGHTS OUT suggests that Sophie’s bipolar or depression led to SPOILER the death of her husbands, which is troubling on its own, especially as a parenthetical. But when Sophie kills herself in order to save her children from Diana, that was downright irresponsible, suggesting that the only way to protect oneself and one’s loved ones from the ravages of mental illness is truly suicide—the way many people suffering already feel. And as I mentioned above, that logic doesn’t even work from the supernatural rules perspective.

There were several ways this movie would have worked much better from a storytelling angle that wouldn’t have been so effing insulting to people with mental illness, and they would have solved the internal logic issues as well. Basically, all Sandberg would have had to do was choose between whether Diana was a human oddity turned haunt or whether she was never human to begin with—angles that allowed MAMA and THE BABADOOK to work where LIGHTS OUT didn’t.

i. Diana as demonic/nonhuman entity: If we hadn’t focused so much on what Diana is and where she came from, she could have simply been a mysterious, malevolent haunt. The only explanation needed would have been that she was there and how to deal with her rather than inadequately trying to explain and humanize her.

Instead of being another inmate at the psych ward who attached to Sophie, with her own backstory and reason for being there, Diana could have just been something that appeared in Sophie’s life before or during the stay at the ward, a parasite that latched onto a tasty host in an ideal hunting ground. The doctors could have believed her to be a dissociative identity or hallucination, but a picture of Sophie at the time could have shown apparitions (i.e. the ghost lady in INSIDIOUS, the shine in THE SIXTH SENSE). And this haunting follows Sophie throughout her life but weakens from medication use. Her presence in Sophie’s house would have to feel less human (with less human motivations), less visible, as with THE BABADOOK.

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Depression can truly feel like a demon on your back, like a form of possession. If LIGHTS OUT had shown that aspect of it the way that THE BABADOOK did, it might have worked better.

ii. Diana as a malevolent/pathetic human ghost: This is something that MAMA did well—and oddly enough, so did the American remake of THE RING. The investigation into Diana’s past with Sophie could have led to more concrete answers, more of a sense of Diana’s humanity—perhaps giving more than a passing nod to Diana’s father and her effect on other people in her life. In THE RING, we saw how living Samara poisoned everything around her, right down to the island she lived on. The viewer was deeply unsettled both by both the girl’s effect and by the antagonism toward a defenseless child. Diana’s presence would have to feel more human, with more human motivations.

One of the aspects of MAMA that sticks with me is that MAMA really was a good mother to those children while they were in her care. The children showed love and affection with her, with the smallest girl happily playing with her.

In LIGHTS OUT, instead of the demon possession of depression, we could have seen what Diana did for Sophie. Once you’re in the midst of a deep depressive episode, there can be a kind of comfort in it even while it rips you apart. It’s familiar. It’s dark and looming and embraces you in its cocoon. Artists have captured this tension with terrifying demon-like creatures offering dark comfort that the world does not—because your depression understands you, while the rest of the world just wants you to go away or spontaneously get better. (Have a listen to Delain’s “Chrysalis – The Last Breath” for a good exmaple of this.) It’s best described by that quote: “I used to wrestle with my inner demons. Now we just snuggle.”

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Credit unknown

Sophie continually asserts through LIGHTS OUT that Diana doesn’t know any better, that she’s just lonely. We could have seen a bit more of that dynamic, the symbiotic relationship that Diana could have had with Sophie rather than just the parasitic. We could have seen Diana’s face; we could have had more pity for her.

There are two other ways I think LIGHTS OUT could have been improved that have nothing to do with the problematic aspects of Diana.

i. Mental illness is often passed down genetically. There was a suggestion that Becca and Martin’s experience of Diana could have been their own suffering rather than their mother’s. But given that Becca didn’t have a therapist or take pills yet managed to escape from Diana, I feel like Sandberg missed an opportunity, especially since Becca would have been a perfect age for mental illness to really proceed screwing up her life. Wayward she might have been, but she seemed to know her own mind and enjoy herself in her little room above the tattoo parlor.

ii. In my opinion, the solution to the movie giving such an irresponsible message about SPOILER suicide is not letting Diana die with the gunshot. She’s an undead parasite. When her host dies, she has to find another, but she won’t die. If we wanted to connect it to the last suggestion, we could have Diana latch onto Becca or Martin, not to destroy them but to wear them down like she did Sophie.

In conclusion: LIGHTS OUT disappoints on many levels because it doesn’t commit to one idea or another, and the ones it tries to run with both don’t make sense and are incredibly troubling, and not in a horror movie way. The poor script and unfocused vision make it impossible for me to recommend.

Instead, check out MAMA (as magical realism rather than horror—del Toro tends toward MR as a genre, but the US doesn’t really acknowledge MR as a separate genre from fantasy or horror and often promotes it incorrectly as horror) or THE BABADOOK for movies far more satisfying, consistent, and intense.

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