Sa ra Cle m e n s o n

P ENNYWISE

PHANTASMAGORIA • HANNIBAL • WEEZER’S TEAL ALBUM •

1984 • BAD HORROR MOVIES

XE PLOITSan UN WINNABLE publication

ISSUE NINETEEN

OCTOBER 2019

Editor in Chief | Stu Horvath

EXPLOITS A Magazine Dedicated to the Reasons We Love Things

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Music Editor | Ed Coleman

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This machine kills fascists.

S K E L E T O N S I N T H E C LO S E Tb y S a r a C l e m e n s

Monsters and ghost stories, supernatural or otherwise, have always been about the deep-seated fears of human beings.

Dracula (the character) is most dangerous as a tool for awakening female sexu-ality, much to the chagrin of the aggressively Victorian male characters, but the Count also represents the invading foreigner hell-bent on upending society as a whole. Bertha Mason, mistaken repeatedly for a ghost during the plot of Jane Eyre, literally and figuratively haunts Thornfield Hall, a symbol of Rochester’s dark past that must be confronted and destroyed before he and Jane can march freely into the future. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ feminist and anti-colonial response to Brontë’s novel, Antoinette (Bertha) is herself haunted by the specter of her mother’s mental illness and tragically succumbs – or is driven – to one of her own in the final chapters.

Most prominently used in IT, the fictionalized town of Derry, Maine, is mythol-ogized by Stephen King as the secret home of an epic and ancient evil. He implants a sinister alien force in the dark pit of the sewers and, over time, its malevolence becomes so entrenched in the everyday happenings of the town that Derry’s citi-zens don’t even notice.

We “other” the things we’re most afraid of, even when it comes from within. So an “all-American” town with its own cookie-cutter Main Street, U.S.A. can sit on top of a rot that goes so deep no one takes any heed of the smell. Children get eaten, consumed; they disappear. The adults turn away – after all, didn’t the same thing happen twenty-some-odd years ago? These things happen. It’s sad, but these things do happen. Pretty soon they drop the “it’s sad” part. Soon enough these things happening don’t even merit a mention at all. And so the cycle repeats.

A group of people with the same color skin die, all at once and by violence. Children bullied by their parents bully in return, marking others with the same scars they carry. Girls get touched, leered at, whistled at, called a bitch, called a slut, called a prude, touched and touched and touched and used and touched until they keep catalogs of ranked offenses so they can dismiss the ones coming in last just to stay sane. The boys that touch win all the races. Their wives cosign it all.

The white people who murder black and brown people get cheeseburgers, get famous, get off in every sense of the word. They kill and touch and use and consume and the people who can help look away or don’t see it at all or think themselves somehow the victim. Just another day in Derry, Maine, population: America.

The greatest gift the horror genre bestows upon us is hope. It’s traditional for monsters and killers to get knocked down and still keep coming – long-standing evil is hard to destroy – but barring the hokiest of transparent attempts to fran-chise, usually there’s some final measure (maybe in the form of a Final Girl) to be utilized to save the day and spare the characters their suffering. Over and over, these measures involve hallmarks of healthiness: Clean-living (the implications of which are problematic and deserve their own essay); the power of commu-nity; direct confrontation and acknowledgement of the monster (fear) itself, often resulting in a literal and figurative belittlement of the threat, the easier to van-quish or dismiss; or ritual – a physical invocation of history and those who came before. What’s important is the idea we can win. There’s always a chance to win in horror; there’s always light on the horizon, however distant. We hang in; we keep fighting. As Mike says at the end of IT: Chapter 2, “nothing lasts forever.” Let’s all hang in there. Let’s all keep fighting. Nothing lasts forever. U

MU S I C

WEEZER (TEAL ALBUM) – This is not nor-mally a critical angle I find terribly useful, but upon repeated (and not entirely intentional) engagement with Weezer’s self-titled (again) 2019 album of covers, I find myself able to do little but ask myself what in the world the band was thinking when they recorded and released this project.

I love covers, and I think that they are a frequently underrated musical outlet. We’re still to some extent recovering from the cult of the singer/songwriter that took hold in the 1960s and 1970s and held much of the popu-lar music industry in a stranglehold through at least the late 1990s. Not every composer is the optimal performer of their own work (for all of Bob Dylan’s undeniable genius as a songwriter, think of Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower”), and there can be as much creativity in arrangement and per-formance as in composition. If Carole King and Neil Diamond fed the cult of the singer/songwriter with their work in the 1970s, it’s worth remembering that they spent much of

the 1960s writing songs for artists including The Drifters, Aretha Franklin and, well, The Monkees.

A cover can bring an unexpected element to a live performance (Prince covering Radio-head’s “Creep”), it can help a new artist catch the ear of a fickle public (the song “Torn” has served this function for several artists includ-ing Natalie Imbruglia), or it can allow an artist to reveal their deep influences (Deftones’ ren-dition of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love”). Tribute bands build entire careers on ultra-faithful renditions of another artist’s catalogue, and there’s a certain accomplishment in that craft of even that.

And then there’s Weezer. There’s some indi-cation that the Teal Album is intended to be consumed with a sense of irony. Weird Al Yankovic stands in for the band in the “Africa” video, and the band is dressed in Miami Vice chic on the album cover. But then, the first time I heard “Africa” on the radio, I didn’t even realize it was a cover until the song was nearly over. (“Huh. I don’t remember there

being this much distortion in the song. Is it . . . a remix?”) But other than a fondness for slightly elevated overdrive on the guitar parts (and even that not much to speak of), there are no real winks on the Teal Album. On the whole, Weezer seems to have worked to reproduce each song as closely as possible to the original, even processing Rivers Cuomo’s vocals to nudge him as close as possible to the original performer. (There are limits to the results – Cuomo’s voice can’t really pull off Roland Orzabal’s baritone – but compare “Africa,” his Jeff Lynne impression on “Mr. Blue Sky” and his almost but not-quite comi-cal Ozzy on “Paranoid.”)

Which leaves us to consider the Teal Album as what? A rather perfunctory tech-nical exercise in replicating someone else’s in-studio audio processing? I never thought I’d find myself complaining that there isn’t enough Weezer on a Weezer album, but maybe that’s the problem in the end. There’s not enough to Weezer for Weezer to bring their own stamp to someone else’s work. Oh well. Now we know, I guess.

– Gavin Craig

“Transylvania,” by Iron Maiden

“Psychobilly Freakout,” by The Reverend Horton Heat

“Evil,” by 45 Grave

“Werewolves of London,” by Paul Roland

“I Hate My Mom,” by GRLwood

“Blackmagic,” by T.S.O.L.

“The Dog/The Body,” by Sleater-Kinney

“Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” by Nouvelle Vague

“Sleeplessness,” by State Faults

“You’re a Wolf,” by Sea Wolf

“Xerox,” by Spotlights

“Graveyard’s Full,” by The Growlers

“Dracula,” by Desmond Dekker

“Your Great Journey,” by The Handsome Family

“The Dead Don’t Die,” by Sturgill Simpson

“Run,” by Air

“Vaguely Human,” by Flesh for Lulu

“Fun Time,” by Peter Murphy

“Pet Sematary,” by Ramones

“Home Alone (on Halloween),” by Titus An-dronicus

Listen now on Spotify

PLAYLIST

MU S I C

1984 – It’s not about sex; it’s about power. This idea is entertained within 1984, where sex is an act of defiance against a repressive state. While the sexually violent fantasy that precedes Winston’s pursuit of an unsanc-tioned relationship with Julia is fleeting, it finds an unfortunate and misdirected echo in the “incel” movement, which employs sexual violence, imagined and real, as a fantasy of retribution.

For Winston, the episode of imagined sexual violence occurs in the Two Minutes of Hate, where he fantasizes of murdering and raping his coworker Julia in an almost ani-malistic fashion. It is brutal and vengeful, rep-resenting his desire to fight back against the restrictions of the Party. The Party may enact the restrictions, but his impotence and rage are channeled against a woman he desires. As seen with Party scapegoat (and Trotsky stand-in) Emmanuel Goldstein, it is easy to direct people’s anger and issues towards other people. Julia herself doesn’t hold significant power, but as a woman and a leader of the Anti-Sex league, she becomes an easy tar-get. Incels enact the same targeting strategy seen in the Two Minutes of Hate. They may talk about other men in the form of “Chads”

and the “80-20” rule, but their vitriol always returns to women. 

In 1984, the state control of sex serves to control passions that could be detrimental to Party loyalty. Sexual violence in Winston’s mind is directed against a perceived loyalist and finds expression in the same language that the Party has given Winston as the sole release outlet for his frustration and rage. To incels, sex is seen as the solution to life’s prob-lems. Their confidence, work, and happiness are all tied to sex, which is then used to justify a hatred of women for supposedly denying them sex. By using sexual violence, they seek to regain a sense of agency by reasserting a fantasy of male domination.

However, in 1984 Winston’s eventual acts of resistance do not revolve around violence against women. Julia is just as powerless as Winston, harmed by the same restrictions of the Party. Incels, on the other hand, seek to place restrictions on others to give themselves a sense of power. They may align themselves with Winston, but they are not a resistance, only a perpetrator of the violence and target-ing that the Party uses within the Two Min-utes of Hate.

– William Dowell

B O O K S

B O O K S

TRUST EXERCISES – Susan Choi takes what seems to be a love letter to theatre kids and their particular brand of self-conscious pre-tend-making and turns in instead a narrative subversion that ruminates on the fictions we perform for others and, more importantly, ourselves. The hard twists may be a touch too dizzying, but the ride is exciting enough to stay gripped until the end.

– SARA CLEMENS

PHANTOMS – Phantoms was the first Dean Koontz novel I ever read . . . and it all went steadily downhill from there. But! Even though I’m not a fan of his body of work in a general sense, Phantoms was (and still is) the most personally terrifying book I’ve ever read.

It’s tough to explain without spoilers but suffice it to say the story tries to explain vari-ous mass-disappearances that have occurred throughout history (which is a real thing, look up “Roanoke Colony”) and Koontz’ theory scares me. A lot.

– Rob Rich

WORLD BRAIN – In the early 20th century, speculation abounded about what the 21st century would look like – flying cars, robot butlers, universal healthcare, etc. H.G. Wells numbered among these inaccurate futurists, writing of time travel, alien invasions and an island with half-human, half-animal hybrids.

Wells later introduced the idea of a global encyclopedia in a series of lectures and arti-cles. Essentially, he thought that we should create a “world brain” that everybody could access so we could all share a single frame of reference. With such a tool, education would improve and intellectuals across the world would unite and create a new world order!

Wells foresaw the interconnected future and the rise of Wikipedia. However, he didn’t foresee the inability of humans to congregate around a shared set of facts. Instead, the idea of a “world brain” seems just as far fetched as a McLuhanesque “global village.” We have factionalized minds that use the vast powers of a global encyclopedia to yell about politics and share memes of fat cats. On that note:

– NOAH SPRINGER

“BAD” HORROR – I am overwhelmed by existential dread. Most of us are, I assume. Whether I read reportage on global mon-strosities, local monstrosities or ecofascist doombaiting, life at the end of history is an uphill battle against the waste of nihilism. I am lucky to have a great many balms against this; my time is spent with good friends and fulfilling hobbies, keeping my anxieties at bay. Recently, I’ve added a new item to this reper-toire: horror films of a . . . certain flavor.

I’m talking about “bad” horror, baby; mov-ies where terror and fear is rendered inert through strange performance, disjointed cinematography or some such beautiful stew of misapplied filmmaking. I love these films, though I think speaking to this comes with some necessary caveats.

1. “Bad” is the descriptor I’ve invoked for ease of understanding, but objective quality is a farce, particularly when it comes to escap-ism. 2. This is not an ironic enjoyment. The value I find in these films is genuine, even if I’m not engaging in the intended mode. 3. A lot of these movies contain varying degrees of heinous content. Some believe exploitation to be intrinsic to this echelon of horror. These people are wrong.

This brand of escapism requires a lot of naked cognitive dissonance, but I believe that’s intrinsic to the form. These movies pres-ent the horrors of the world – many of which map directly onto my own fears – in a context where it is not possible for me to feel afraid. Nuclear annihilation is but a mirthful beat in the wildly enjoyable Skybound (2017), the only film that dares to ask “what if the ground was gone?” Soapy dialogue paired with a deli-ciously low-stakes story vehicle (the worst first date of all time) sucks the wind out of

global catastrophe. In this conception of the apocalypse, extinction is rushed-CGI window dressing, not the clear and present danger we live under daily.

When you live with death on the brain, however, you fear both the big and the small. But when Dwayne is garroted by his girlfriend in Dead Body (2017), I cackle. Why? Well, for starters, every actor is a full-grown adult playing a graduating highschooler. Also: her decision to murder Dwayne is predicated on a nakedly faulty belief that he’s been responsible for the evening’s murders. To point: immedi-ately after killing Dwane, the same woman accuses another friend of being the killer and flees for her safety. Though Dead Body’s special effects are far more weighty than the likes of Skybound, the end result is the same: the impact of traumatic violence undercut by cinematic goonery.

These films strip bare the artifice, and – by necessity of genre – apply it to all man-ner of brutality. No movie is “real,” though that’s not the point – the smoke and mirrors are obfuscated such that the unreal evokes genuine feeling. “Bad” horror operates in the inverse: they are so not real that their con-struction diminishes the reality they portray and reflect, tipping the scales of fear in my favor by removing its heft. Of course, we all have our boundaries – beauty, eyes, behold-ers – but I’m willing to push up against them to laugh in the face of death. Crack a smile, everyone – it’s the end of the fucking world.

– Thomas Loughney

MOV I E S

MOV I E S

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

– Sure, it’s deeply nostalgic for a small town America of the past that likely never existed, but the Disney adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s story of fathers, sons and mortality is still a damn fine flick. Evil carnivals may seem passé in a post Insane Clown Posse world, but I dare you to find a such a sinister agent of temptation as Jonathan Pryce’s top hatted turn as Mr. Dark. Hop on board this carou-sel, you won’t be disappointed.

– Stu Horvath

The MEG – I know this is, at its core, a some-what campy Jaws-esque Jason Statham romp, but the first act of this movie – at least I think it’s the first act because I’m never ever going to watch this movie in my life ever – is like somebody put my worst fear and most recur-ring nightmare on the big screen.

Being inside a submerged glass enclosure with dark water all around and a huge shark swimming in the murk is, like, exactly the thing that terrifies me the most. So yeah, I don’t care how it ends or how little of the movie might actually take place in the deep-est parts of the ocean because I’m not going anywhere near this thing.

– Rob Rich

WNUF HALLOWEEN SPECIAL – This movie is a Halloween tradition for me at this point, a spooky season spectacular that feels as though it has always been there. Shot on a video camera and then intentionally de-stroyed further, the video quality feels like some sort of bootleg film you find at a flea market, junky and destroyed. WNUF is a found-footage film in the way that found-footage actually works, pretending to be a television broadcast from 1987, recorded to someone’s VCR, of a man investigating and exorcising a haunted house in town. Every-thing completely falls apart quickly after that, with broadcasts interrupted by televi-sion white noise and faux commercials that feel so desperately earnest you wonder if you have accidentally stumbled upon a real life broadcast.

– AMANDA HUDGINS

T E L EV I S IO N

HANNIBAL – Hannibal is about the scariest thing there is: relationships. Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter spend their lives trying to relate to people, each in their own . . . unique ways. Will empathizes. Hannibal consumes. Both Will and Hannibal also think they’ve constructed defense mechanisms to pro-tect themselves from their discoveries. Will believes the same empathy that allows him to relate to others will save him from the dam-age he inflicts on himself to do it. Hannibal believes that his God-like detachment allows him to consume his victims without being consumed by them in turn. Hannibal is a show about how dead wrong they both are.

Will and Hannibal spend their lives engaged in an obsessive psychosexual battle of wills. At each turn, Will and Hannibal both believe they hold the advantage. Hannibal believes he can manipulate Will’s empathy to reshape Will in his own image. Will believes he can

manipulate Hannibal into revealing himself as the killer he is. They’re both right, but only to a point. Both Will and Hannibal also believe they can manipulate the other without falling victim to their rival’s manipulation. They each think that, somehow, because they can per-ceive the other man’s manipulations, they can withstand or counter them. But as Hannibal notes, “perception is a tool that’s pointed on both ends.”

Will and Hannibal are defenseless to each other. Their hatred and lust only fuels their love for and power over one another. All of their supposed defenses, brilliance, empathy and detachment amount to nothing. This is the horror of Hannibal: we have no defense against each other. The things we love are remaking us, and we are remaking them, always. What could be scarier? 

– Harry Mackin

T E L EV I S IO N

CREEPSHOW – I must have checked the Creepshow comic out of my town’s public library a dozen times. The schlocky movies were also favorites of mine, with just enough comedy to cut the horror – my teenage self was way more of a scaredy cat than the jaded old lady typing before you. I want to like this series, I really do. And I have a hard and fast rule not to judge any television show by its pilot, since pilots almost universally struggle under the weight of having to establish every-thing the viewer needs to know about the world, the characters and the show’s internal logic. However, the first episode of the new series was an honest-to-god drag. The first story utilizes way too much voiceover while criminally underusing Adrienne Barbeau (this will not stand!), and moves at a glacial pace. The second improves on the pacing and provides some genuinely creepy moments with a little girl and her dollhouse, but the acting is strange and stilted across the board. This suggests the actors were purposefully directed to perform this way, but to what end remains a mystery. I’m still in for episode 2 next week, but Creepshow is going to have to start really showing up, real soon.

– Sara Clemens

AMERICAN HORROR STORY: 1984 – Ryan Murphy is back with a nostalgic look at the slashers. AHS: 1984 has hints of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Sleepaway Camp and a hell of a lot of Friday the 13th.

Despite my love of slasher movies, the nostalgia here doesn’t cut it. AHS feels like it’s going through the motions, but all the bad ones that turned me off previous sea-sons. There’s no build up; there’s no tension. When people are getting gored in the first episode, it’s impossible to get a new scare in the second. Given Murphy’s lack of interest in maintaining any mystery or excitement in AHS, maybe it’s time we put it out to pasture and let him move onto something he’s more passionate about.

– NOAH SPRINGER

BUZZFEED UNSOLVED SUPERNATURAL

– I’d avoided this show for years because of the Buzzfeed moniker, but Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural is the only ghost hunting shows I will ever need. Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej have the kind of on-screen chemistry that probably has obscene fanfiction attached, but is also just fun to watch. Ryan works as the diehard believer, bringing out the tools of the ghost-hunting trade and quaking in fear, while Shane plays as his straight-faced foil. As someone who has always bounced off of the carnival barker enthusiasm of ghost hunting shows, Unsolved Supernaturals’ combination of belief and scoffing incredulity is perfect.

– AMANDA HUDGINS

GA M E S

PHANTASMAGORIA – Revisiting Sierra Entertainment’s Phantasmagoria after 24 years is an exercise in cheese and posterity. As one of the earliest full motion videogames, it became a pillar of nightly entertainment at home, as I was allowed to play through it (on seven CD-ROMs!) with my dad. This was a bad idea for a ten-year-old; since this was an Adult Game, my dad would send me out of the room for certain cutscenes, including its infamous rape scene.

With its surreal architecture, arcane UI and what was then the groundbreaking realism of FMV, Phantasmagoria became a disjointed spectre of my childhood. Even with these tucked away as memories, playing it again as an adult was horrifying in ways I didn’t anticipate.

Adrienne Delaney is a novelist who moves into a cursed mansion – a strange, sprawling estate once owned by a sadistic magician with a Bluebeard-style habit of marrying women who kept dying. An evil spirit possesses Adri-enne’s husband and she must keep her shit together to get out alive. While the plot is uninspired, writer Roberta Williams lined it with a surprising amount of feminist subtext for its time, presenting Adrienne as a resilient alternative to a popular male archetype at the time – the protagonist as novelist. Like Ste-phen King’s Jack Torrance (The Shining) and

Thad Beaumont (The Dark Half), these men become one with the horror in their envi-ronments, painting a romanticized picture of derangement and loss of control. Many critiques of Phantasmagoria deride its thinly-veiled cribbing of The Shining, in which Jack’s wife, Wendy, is terrorized by her husband. Unlike the women paired with these men, Adrienne has far more agency to escape the cyclical terror that permeates the house’s his-tory, uncovering its secrets at her own pace.

Williams once said Phantasmagoria best represents her career as a game designer. It’s curious that the woman known for co-found-ing Sierra On-Line would choose arguably her campiest work. And with the benefit of hind-sight, it’s hard not to read Phantasmagoria as an allegory for abuse. Perhaps the real horror is how well Phantasmagoria played into the hackneyed fantasies of a male audience, as Williams openly said that Adrienne needed to be “very empathetic to most people; most women would relate to her, and most men would want to protect her.” But even with its corny acting, dated graphics, and lacklustre narrative, Phantasmagoria managed to reveal something rare: a glimpse at the stress, isola-tion and torment of abusive cycles – telling a story that shouldn’t be told, by someone who shouldn’t be alive to share it.

– ALEXIS ONG

BLAIR WITCH – Bloober Team found a new way to be spooky: By giving you a furry friend to help you, making you rely on him the entire time and creating panic whenever you lose sight of him. It’s a shame, then, that the story relies on bad mental health tropes to sell its scares

– Jeremy Signor

DOOM – It’s been a few years but dammit I still adore Doom. The weapons are punchy, the enemies are numerous and varied (and classic), the gore is gratuitous but cartoony in an amusing way and I could keep going so I’m going to stop.

But basically, Doom is extremely good. It captures the nostalgia while also pushing things a bit further, encouraging fast tra-versal (and faster violence), and even allow-ing for some exploration if you want to try and dig up secret collectibles or those goofy classic pixelated homage areas.

– Rob Rich

GA M E S

MY FRIEND PEDRO – My Friend Pedro sticks to the winsome formula that publisher Devolver Digital adores so much: a quirky, stylish and spectacularly violent experience featuring bombastic gun-fu. You play as a nameless vigilante who’s taking down homi-cidal street gangs, sometimes on blasting enemies while balancing on skateboards and motorbikes. In one stage, you’re even gun-ning down enemies as you’re falling off an impossibly tall skyscraper. And like the reti-cent heroes of neo-noir action thriller, you’ll be performing impeccably timed backflips and spraying bullets with wild abandon, all to the beat of a smooth synthwave soundtrack. It’s a devilishly addictive, side-scrolling expe-rience that encourages you to chain your attack combos, break your own high scores and nail the perfect run over and over and over again.

– KHEE HOON CHAN

I NT E R RO GAT IV E

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Orrin Grey and I’m a skeleton who likes monsters. I also write, occasionally. I’ve published more than 60 short stories and half-a-dozen or so spooky books, including three story collections and two volumes of essays on vintage horror cinema. I also sporadically write about movies – old and new, horror and not (but mostly horror) for Unwinnable and Signal Horizon, among other places.

Why do you do what you do?

I try to write what I call “fun” horror, because that’s what horror has always been for me – fun. I have an anxiety disorder, and I worry about just about everything, but horror and monsters are different. Even when they do scare me, it’s in a way that makes me feel energized, like I’m glowing in the dark. All my other worries tend to grind me down, but not horror.

I’m sure there are other, more thoughtful reasons behind why I do what I do, but I try not to shine too bright a light on them, for fear that it will dispel some of the magic. I do what I do because it’s what I love, and most days that’s good enough.

What is the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done?

On the advice of my attorneys, I’d rather not say.

What is a creative work that has changed you and how did it do so?

Perhaps it’s cheating, because this is not just one creative work, but Mike Mignola’s work on Hellboy changed my life. Mike has a story he tells in interviews about how read-ing Dracula when he was young made him realize that he only wanted to draw monsters. I had a similar realization, but mine came from reading Mignola’s Hellboy comics. Unfortu-nately, I can’t draw, so, well, here we are.

What is your least favorite thing?

It feels a bit like a cop out, especially in this day and age, but bigotry. Homophobia, rac-ism, xenophobia, body shaming, slut shaming, those ubiquitous “kids these days” essays about how crappy Millenials are, you name it, pretty much. Any excuse people make to try to demonize other people. I’m also not a fan of raw onions.

Eat the rich?

Yeah, definitely. 100%. They’re probably pretty terrible for us, though. I mean, most of them don’t seem super healthy. So we’ll have to find someone who knows how to prepare them safely . . . U

Interrogation conducted by Stu Horvath