by Sean McTiernan

Thus continues our Horror Movie A Day Throughout October project! Our coverage will move from the shoddy to the sublime.

You’ve probably seen parts of this movie. And it’s good that “Silent Night, Deadly Night” got at least some partial recognition. It was inevitable of course, the forces of nature wouldn’t let something like SNDN 2 fade into obscurity. And by forces of nature I’m talking about internet nerds.

Whether it be the top five quotes:

Or indeed, the infamous “Garbage day!” clip:

But I’m making the call now to go further. Those videos genuinely only starch the surface of this movie. In fact, it’s probably fair to say SNDN 2 is the In the Realms of the Unreal of schlocky 80s horror movies, waiting to be discovered afresh by every generation. And leading man Eric Freeman (currently residing in Parts Unknown) is its Henry Darger. (That analogy doesn’t hold up under scrutiny at all, let’s just move on and say we were all glad we got it, alright?)
The original “Silent Night Deadly Night: was pretty gonzo concept to begin with. A child, Billy, witnesses his parents get murdered brutally at the hands of someone dressed like Santa Claus, gets moved to an orphanage, the sisters put all sorts of puritanical rage inside of him and he eventually grows up to murder people while dressed as Santa Claus. Hey: talent imitates, genius steals.

Sadly though, you can’t stroll around in red felt shouting “Naughty!” at people before hacking them to pieces for too long before you attract some negative attention. Near the end of “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” Billy focuses his attention on killing Mother Superior, the nun who was the principal cause of his rage and bloodlust (his parents’ brutal murder was probably also a factor but I really hate nuns so let’s place all the blame squarely on Mother Superior). Just before he can get his revenge, he gets shot. But as he is dying, the camera pans up to reveal, through a music cue that owes little to subtlety, that maybe his brother might continue his work.

This was a pretty good slasher movie. The actual message (which is sort of anti-puritanism if you squint a bit) is pretty condemnable, the action is well shot and grotesque and it caused a storm of controversy. That’ll happen when you re-release a movie on Christmas Eve that features Santa interrupting a couple in flagrante delicto so he can strangle the man with fairy lights. Especially when said movie also features a topless woman impaled on a mounted elk’s horns. This storm of controversy helped the movie turned a profit. So naturally a sequel had to follow.

The studio weren’t willing to spend a lot of money though. In fact, initially they presented director Lee Harry and Joesph Earl with the original footage and demanded they cut a sequel out of it. Having a passing familiar with reason and logic Harry and Earl (both also members of the First Names As Last Names Club) demanded they be allowed to shoot new footage. So, on a shoestring, they managed to build out a copious amount of footage from the first “Silent Night Deadly Night” and some stuff they shot themselves on the cheap. The premise of the sequel is what’d you expect from the end of the first, the little brother grows up and decides to don the fur-lined hat and Get Real On Christmas. The execution (I know, I know) though, is what makes this move something,

The film takes place mostly in an office where Ricky, brother of Billy, is being given a psychiatric evaluation. Luckily for the film makers, Ricky remembers huge chunks of Billy’s life in great detail. Even bits where he was 6 months old or not around. This lets them use 45 minutes of footage from the original movie again, now with Ricky’s stentorian narration (which we’ll get to in a second). I would imagine at the time this would’ve been soul destroying for SNDN fans, to rush to a sequel only to see half of the last movie again. Now though, in a world where not everyone has seen SNDN (I know, unthinkable), the opposite is true. What you get is a lean 45 minute cut of the original, trimmed of any filler and messing around. It’s actually quite artfully cut down, the kills had to be made less gore cause of the higher body count, and I think a lot of slasher movies would benefit from the 45 minute cut.

But this streamlined version of the original is not the only thing this movie brings to the table. Not by a long shot. What the film makers decided to do was take the surprisingly grimy approach of the first SNDN and turn it on its head, making the sequel (well, the 45 minutes of new footage) more akin to an episode of Animaniacs than its predecessor. Well, an episode of Animaniacs where everyone who does pretty much anything gets brutally murdered by a bug-eyed jock shouting the word “punish!” I’m also not sure if Animaniacs featured a man getting an umbrella opened inside him. There’s definitely an episode where someone shoots a car twice and it explodes though. Still I should probably rethink this whole Animaniacs comparison.

Sometimes if someone is terrible in a movie you wonder if they might need a bit more training before they should have ventured on screen. With Eric Freeman, star of SNDN2, you wonder if he’s actually seen a movie before or is aware in any real way of what acting is. I’m not saying he’s bad. That would be missing the point. This is actually where the outsider art Darger comparison above kind of comes into play. It’s not that his performance is terrible, it’s that it’s impossible to identify where he got the idea he should be doing the things he choose to do. He bugs his eyes out. He contorts his voice into a playground-badass growl, even for normal conversations. When trying to be threatening, he sounds like a high sarcastic person. His facial expression is always somewhere between inquisitive, scolded-child and crazy eyes killer. Sometimes he just laughs to himself: a lot. You know every movie where an alien comes to earth, wears human skin and ends up doing that hammy, staring-like-a-confused-dog, act? Well this beats them all and this dude wasn’t even trying.

Eric Freeman even manages to wear sweaters aggressively, something which I still haven’t fully figured out. In fact Eric gives such a compelling and illogical performance that you don’t even notice he doesn’t don the Santa suit till the last 10 minutes of the movie. By then you’re probably under the impression it’s impossible to kick the insanity up a notch. But don’t worry: Eric Freeman got your back, kid.

Eric was never in another major (or minor) movie roll, his wikipedia lists some minor tv credits but he seems to have all but disappeared. This is why SNDN 2 is so important. It’s the lone artifact left by a man whose approach to shlock film acting is both impossible to explain and oddly compelling.

So there you have it, a streamlined slasher and the sole performance of a man possessed. Two great reasons to watch “Silent Night Deadly Night 2.” There’s more here than 60 seconds of a viral video: this is a movie (well, two movies) worth watching in full.

PUNISH!

Sean Mc Tiernan is 21, his favorite rapper is E40 and he wants to assure you he does sometimes go outside. He has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum.You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.

by Kaila Hale-Stern

It is an ever more wretched time to be a smoker in New York City. Mayor Scrooge McDuck sends undercover investigators to reservations and plots banning cigarette-smoking in public spaces, having nothing better to do or any jobs to create. Now cigarettes can cost as much as $13.50 a pack, putting each cigarette at roughly 67 of your hard-earned cents-rapidly approaching McDonald’s dollar menu territory.

Smokers are usually not allowed to complain, what with the litany of dangers we are inflicting on ourselves and others that must be appended. I have heard about your asthma and the terrible asthma of your children, and your relief in not needing to clean your clothing after a night out at the bar. And, yes, it’s hard to see increased quit rates as a bad thing, coerced as they may be. But we’ve reached an unbalanced position with both the commodity of smoking and-yes, Kathleen Parker!-government regulation.

In many states and cities smokers are already forced from the shelter of buildings, but we’re alone in sky-high pricing, a New York classic. The cultural impact is that cigarettes have gained a new value and smokers are working out complicated new etiquette due to their increased valuation.

By driving the cost to laughable heights-one bodega owner told me the price would top $15, and its all tax, as the stores only make between .23 and .75 cents a pack-the Mayor isn’t doing anyone attached to the city’s economy any favors. Dedicated smokers will still get their fix, and be pushed to find other sources. They already are, and New York City business lose out.

Suddenly the cigarettes are gone, and you’re forking $12 back over to Bloomberg and Albany, a neat trick. But soon you learn to take your money elsewhere and, at least, have your friend bring a bunch up from Virginia. And New York loses another smoker-not to the righteous joys of quitting, but to supplement a gas station in a less ridiculous state.

New York state’s audacity, going so far as to threaten Native American tax-free cigarette exemptions, led the Shinnecock tribe’s representative to call the tax hike “just another extension of… the genocidal tactics of New York state.” It’s a move that could potentially destroy local tribal economies and led to protests when similar measures were proposed in 1997.

The price-hikes have also created an environment surrounding cigarettes that is equal parts desperate, humbling and revealing. Smoking is passing poor people by-and giving them an opportunity to become smoking criminals-and an underground market thrives in the rationality void.

Because of the jacked-up price, the etiquette around bumming has especially shifted. What was once an easily shareable resource has become precious, rare, expensive. You took the time to go and buy your favorite brand for as much money as you would spend for a whole big lunch, and then people-strangers-come up and want to take them from you.

In present-day New York you’ll encounter several primary sources of cigarette drain. By nature smokers interact more-that’s rather the point-and it was never a big deal when a friend wanted one or a random person on the street stopped you. All part of the nicotine brotherhood.

As a fervent believer in cigarette karma, I never thought I would reach the point where I was resentful of the request for a smoke. Now, it’s different.

First there are the people that you know: the friend who never smokes but actually always does, the friend at work who does the same, the friend who only smokes at night so hasn’t bought cigarettes quite yet, the friend who only smokes when they’re drinking, which is often, or at least, they are only drinking when they see other people. Then there are the jonesing colleagues, to whom you owe fealty. You will freely and willingly offer cigarettes to these people, and be karmically rewarded.

The increasing pool of random strangers requesting a cigarette has become trickier to negotiate. The carton you brought back from that place didn’t last like it was supposed to. You’ll begin to suspiciously eye those eying you smoking on the street. Do they just have asthma or children or are they smokers?

It’s now popular to begin the approach with an offer of money, either visible or proposed, to smooth the way. You’ll see them coming with a clutched dollar (or fishing in their pockets for a pretend dollar) and a craving hope in their eyes. Some of these people are sincere, and should be aided. Whether you accept money is a personal choice; many are hoping that you’ll turn them down anyway and the pitch will be enough. You can see this in their eyes, too.

You’ll be approached by inquisitive homeless people, who deserve a goddamned cigarette. You’ll meet lazy rich people whose bags cost more than you make in a month and are an open call, depending on your mood and need to feel magnanimous. You’ll talk to nice, genuine members of the black-lung brotherhood. You’ll make new friends forever and drunken enemies who curse you on the street if you deny them.

Smokers know we’re doing a bad thing, which is one reason why it’s so very good. But despite the things we have done, we’re not responsible for New York’s multi-billion dollar deficit. We’re one with you people who love french fries and a nice beverage and not getting hassled for taking photos in public places. Which is to say: when you’re fined for ripping open a salt packet in Bryant Park, don’t come crying to us.

Smoking as a habit could (and should) be on the wane, but those of us in the transition time must endure its slow, government-enforced demise and shifts in significance and cost. We’re already adjusting to a city where the act and art of negotiating for a smoke has become grandiose, a meaningful gesture. Now that’s, give or take, 67 cents you’re burning. The other day at a stoop sale I bought a $1 shirt for two cigarettes, at a loss. The anti-smoking crusade has for now just ensured I relish every last filthily expensive puff.

But it’s also making me into a selfish, cynical cigarette-hoarding bastard. One who will be able to buy sexual favors with a $50 pack in the not-so-distant dystopic future, in some dark flooded alleyway shared with newly emboldened subway rats. These will be the only places left for the carcinogenic outcast, and our memories.

Kaila Hale-Stern is currently a smoker. Her primary concerns are the duplicities of history, the scourge of pop culture and not letting Mayor Bloomberg win the battle against cigarettes. She can be read here and reached here.

Photo by Mendhak from Flickr.

“Socialising with alcohol is fun and we should not pretend otherwise. We also shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that young adults won’t eventually discover this and want to do it themselves. There is a reason why a taste for alcohol is not specific to a single demographic in society; why it is not something we ‘grow out of’ and why, no matter how many times the NHS warns of it detrimental effects, we won’t stop drinking the stuff. That’s because chatting with friends over a pint or a bottle of wine is an enjoyable cultural tradition: the fuel of conversation, intimacy and the exchange of ideas.”
-My new hero Suzy Dean makes some very sensible remarks about alcohol.

This is it! The end! Cathy DIES this weekend! So long, tragicomic. Just to remind you of the agony, here’s a clip from the 80s TV special! It’s a meditation on-oh God whatever.

Cool! Dolphins apparently change their clicking and whistle sounds in the presence of other species of dolphins in order to better communicate with each other. Or so indicates the audio research of biologist Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico, who recorded pods of bottlenose dolphins and Guyana dolphins separately, and then as they came into contact with each other off the coast of Costa Rica. As Dr. May-Collado told BBC Earth News:

“I was surprised by these findings, as I was expecting both species to emphasise, perhaps exaggerate, their species-specific signals. Instead the signals recorded during these encounters became more homogenous. This was a very exciting discovery.”

It was! And not just because we now know that these highly intelligent cetaceans are probably conspiring against humans in their underwater language codes. (Or, at the very least, making fun of us.) But also because it presents an opportunity for me to recommend that you read this article about Dr. John Cunningham Lilly from the May/June issue of Orion magazine. I just read it recently, and it’s great!

A sort of real-life Dr. Doolittle, Lilly was experimenting on dolphin brains in the late ’50s, when, as one of his unlucky specimens was dying, it emitted a “wheezing phonations that Lilly interpreted as an effort to mimic the voices of the laboratory personnel.” Feeling himself on the verge of a monumentally important scientific discovery, Lilly spent the next decade trying his darnedest to “break through” our inter-special barrier with dolphins and establish real communication with them. He got millions of dollars in grant money and published a very succesful book, Man and Dolphin, and got a credit line on the 1963 movie Flipper. He was also the inspiration for William Hurt’s character in Altered States. His story takes us

through the strange history of postwar American science and culture, and the unbraiding of a set of unlikely historical threads: Cold War brain science, military bioacoustics, Hollywood mythopoesis, and early LSD experimentation.

J. Edgar Hoover, extra-terrestrial research and interspecies sexual congress, too! Please read it. I’m telling you, it’s got it all.

Podcasts you may find amusing should you like that kind of thing.

Horror Chick: ‘Let Me In’ and the Blessed Vampire Redemption

Pity the vampires. They’ve been tucked and slicked and oiled and waxed out of any shred of real dignity. Whatever happened to the grainy, unwashed horror of Dracula? The blood-soaked poetry of Bram Stoker? Nowadays vampires are a joke — walking sex toys with their spackled hair and waxy genitals and teams of rabid publicists who are far scarier than any bloodsucker in history.

And yet for even the most heinous cinematic-genre crimes, redemption can arrive in myriad ways. In this case, it came from Sweden.

Let the Right One In, aka “That Swedish Vampire Movie That Almost No One Saw,” was a marvel. Moody, textured, well-paced, perfectly-acted (by children, no less), and most of all, totally original. The film emancipated vampire-ness from its dungeon of shtick and made it a tragic curse again, a grim, chaotic mess that drove two fantastic characters to do bloody things and make acute choices that, well, you could see yourself making if you happened to be 12 years old and in love with a friggin’ vampire.

Granted, the miracle that was Let the Right One In — both the John Lindqvist novel and the award-winning film — got buried in the U.S., which was fast becoming a hatching ground for a Swedish-mystery-mania that would soon devour our eyeballs (and wallets). Due to some cultural force I will never understand, a dyspeptic trio of Swedish novels has now claimed its place as the new Da Vinci Code (and if those damn Girl With Not a Single Realistic Character Trait books continue their chokehold on this country, I may have to stage some Terry Jones-style burnings).

So it came as a pleasant surprise when Overture Films announced it was remaking Let the Right One In, this time in the U.S. (meaning it would be in English-which honestly wasn’t an issue in the first film at all, except that Americans seem to have a scathing allergy to subtitles).

Even more pleasant was the casting announcement: Chloe Moretz, the “See-You-Next-Tuesday”-uttering savior of Kick-Ass, would be playing the vampire. The father character would be Richard Jenkins, who always plays the hell out of aging, desperate men, and then the boy-really the most crucial character-was the doe-eyed Kodi Smit-McPhee, a.k.a. “that porcelain kid who had to suffer through Viggo Mortensen’s B.O. in The Road.”

Of course, you never know with an American remake of a European film-half the time they’ll toss in a Jonas Brothers cameo plus a crapload of CGI for good measure. But here’s the thing: Let Me In is good. Seriously f&*king good. The mood and granular consistency are there from the first scene, creeping you out while simultaneously drawing you in. Director Matt Reeves (who also did Cloverfield, but we won’t hold that against him-not permanently, anyway) captures the 80s in a way that most filmmakers are afraid to: without a hint of nostalgia. No leg warmers and silly haircuts here-it’s a grim and pulverant time invaded by David Bowie songs (seriously, there is a major Bowie fetish going on with the score of this movie) and fractured ideals, with Reagan’s face beaming incessantly from the TV and Rubix Cubes dominating lonely boyhood hours.

And then there are the kids. These children act their way into a space that 99% of American movie stars can’t even approach. They create a world that children know, and adults still relate to based on niggling memories of what it was like to not be socially obligated to be a jerkoff all the time. The only thing more remarkable than Moretz’s scenes with Smit-McPhee are her scenes with Jenkins. A child playing an adult-in-a-child’s-body is a pretty remarkable thing to achieve-Kirsten Dunst pulled it off in “Interview With the Vampire,” and it was almost frightening to watch (as in, “more frightening than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt flinging homoeroticism across the screen”). Moretz ups the ante even further-particularly one scene in the hospital, where a single look she gives Jenkins provides around 40 years worth of backstory. Dirty-mouthed chick can act, and she carries this movie as easily as she did those GE M134 miniguns in Kick-Ass.

Let’s just pray that she doesn’t get super famous, go Lohan, and lose it all in a storm of beaver shots and blow. Please, Chloe, we beg you. The agony would be too great.

Melissa Lafsky does like children just not usually on screen.

“Remarks from Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives (from C-SPAN 9/28/10 coverage). His grandson sits behind him.” Given the harrowing story the Congressman is telling in this speech, it’s probably all for the best that the kid keeps falling asleep. Sheesh! Anyway, meet your new meme.

A Poem by Tracy K. Smith

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS

1.

We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space…. Though
Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

2.

Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.
A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,
He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.

Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,
Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,
Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires

Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t.
I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.
That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.

Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank
Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.
He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:
May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.
Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air
Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.
We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone

One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.

3.

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,
That the others have come and gone-a momentary blip-
When all along, space might be chock-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they-we-flicker in.

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be
One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.
And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
For the first time in the winter of 1959.

4.

In those last scenes of Kubrick’s “2001”
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint in water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night-tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on….

In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?

On the set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.

5.

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is-

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Tracy K. Smith’s two previous collections of poems, Duende and The Body’s Question, won the James Laughlin Award and the Cave Cavem Poetry Prize. Life on Mars will be published by Graywolf Press in May. Smith teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Visit our vast archive of poetry!

“You don’t make television by yourself. It’s a collaborative art form-if it’s an art form at all; a craft?-and it really comes down to how good the people are that you accumulate around you. And I expect that a lot of my success is from the fact that I had really good actors working with me, I had really good directors working with me, I had great writers that were on my staff that helped me keep those shows fresh and alive. And I’m a fairly diligent writer. I think if you write for five hours everyday, Saturday and Sunday included, for 40 years, you’d be surprised by how much you can write!”
-Legendary television writer/producer Stephen J. Cannell (“The A-Team,” “The Greatest American Hero,” “The Rockford Files” and “21 Jump Street” among many others) passed away yesterday. He spoke with Logan Sachon last summer about how he managed to do everything in an impossibly busy career. Cannell was 69.