DC's

* (Halloween countdown post #3; restored)

 

In 1897, the French playwright Oscar Metenier, bought a theater at the end of the impasse Chaptal, a cul-de-sac in Paris’ Pigalle district, in which to produce his controversial naturalist plays. The smallest theater in Paris, it was also the most atypical. Two large angels hung above the orchestra and the theater’s neogothic wood paneling; and the boxes, with their iron railings, looked like confessionals (the building had, in fact, once been a chapel). Metenier was himself a frequent target of censorship for having the audacity to depict a milieu which had never before appeared on stage — that of vagrants, street kids, prostitutes, criminals, and “apaches,” as street loafers and con artists were called at the time — and moreover for allowing those characters to express themselves in their own language. One of the Grand-Guignol’s first plays, Metenier’s Mademoiselle Fifi, which was temporarily shut down by police censors, presented the first prostitute on stage; his subsequent play, Lui!, united a whore and a criminal in the enclosed space of a hotel room.

 

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‘Gianni Proia’s ‘shock-umentary’ ECCO contains this short scene, which the filmmaker claims is of the final performance at the Grand Guignol Theatre. Whether this is true or not is unclear, as much of the other ‘reality’ footage in the film appears to be either staged or grossly misrepresented. The footage does show actors from the Grand Guignol performing a scene for the cameras as well as some brief interior shots of the theatre itself.’

 

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Metenier was succeeded as director in 1898 by Max Maurey, who, from 1898 to 1914, turned the Theatre du Grand-Guignol into a house of horror. He measured the success of a play by the number of people who fainted during its performance, and, to attract publicity, hired a house doctor to treat the more fainthearted spectators. It was also Maurey who discovered the novelist and playwright Andre de Lorde–“the Prince of Terror.” Under the influence of de Lorde (who collaborated on several plays with his therapist, the experimental psychologist Alfred Binet), insanity became the Grand-Guignolesque theme par excellence. At a time when insanity was just beginning to be scientifically studied, the Grand-Guignol repertoire explored countless manias and ‘special tastes’: L’Homme de la Nuit (The Man of the Night) presented a necrophiliac. L’Horrible Passion (The Horrible Passion) depicted a young nanny who strangled the children in her care. (Like Metenier, de Lorde was often a target of censorship, particularly in England where two of his plays were canceled by the Lord Chamberlain’s censors.

 

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This is an excellent site about Le Grand Guignol that unfortunately presents itself in French language only. However, there are videos showing historically accurate recreations of two Grand Guignol plays, Le Baiser Dans La Nuit and Le Faiseur De Monstres, which you can find by entering the site then clicking on the link titled Pieces.

 

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Fear of ‘the other’ appeared at the Grand-Guignol in countless variations: fear of the proletariat, fear of the unknown, fear of the foreign, fear of contagion (for all the blood spilled, sperm ejaculated, and sweat dripped there, the Grand-Guignol had to feel some degree of nostalgia for cleanliness). The heroes of Gardiens de phare (Lighthouse Keepers) and Le Beau Regiment (The Handsome Regiment) had rabies. Leprosy decimated the passengers of Le Navire aveugle (The Blind Ship), and the servants in L’Auberge rouge (The Red Inn) fell prey to a mysterious malady. In several plays, among them La Fosse aux filles (The Girls’ Den), a brothel visitor was exposed to syphilis. But what carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness, loss of control, panic: themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify. When the Grand-Guignol’s playwrights expressed an interest in the guillotine, what fascinated them most were the last convulsions played out on the decapitated face. What if the head continued to think without the body? The passage from one state to another was the crux of the genre.

 

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The Tragedies’ Theatre is small American theater company that stages the original Grand Guignol plays in English with period costumes, makeup, and props. There’s more than a bit of irksome American style staginess and corniness about their versions, but the qualities of the original plays can be discerned. Here’s their version of the play Chop Chop.

The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – Final Kiss

The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – Laboratory of Hallucinations

The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – CADAVRES EXQUIS

 

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Under the direction of Camille Choisy, who directed the theater from 1914 to 1930, staging overtook text. Once he even bought a fully equipped operating room as a pretext for a new play. In 1917, he hired the actress Paula Maxa, who soon became known as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal.” During her career at the Grand-Guignol, Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was subjected to a range of tortures unique in theatrical history: she was shot with a rifle and with a revolver, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses, kissed by a leper, and subjected to a very unusual metamorphosis, which was described by one theater critic: “Two hundred nights in a row, she simply decomposed on stage in front of an audience which wouldn’t have exchanged its seats for all the gold in the Americas. The operation lasted a good two minutes during which the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”

 

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‘At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening’s faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals.’ — Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: theatre of fear and terror.

 

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If the Grand-Guignol was a popular theater in both meanings of the word — it was frequented by neighborhood locals as well as the higher-brow audience of the Comedie Francaise — it was not a public affair. Going to the Grand-Guignol was less a social act than a private one and certain audience members preferred not to be seen. Some witnesses reported that the iron-grilled boxes in the back of the theater encouraged a certain ‘extremism.’ The cleaning staff would often find the seats stained. With the arrival of Jack Jouvin, who directed the theater from 1930 to 1937, the repertoire shifted from gore to psychological drama. Wanting to have complete control over the theater, Jouvin ousted Maxa, who, in his opinion, was stealing the spotlight. Jouvin’s lack of talent and his personal ambition triggered the eventual downfall of the Grand-Guignol. Birth, evolution, death: the genre sowed the seed of its own decline when it began to parody itself. The abundance of terrifying elements in the later plays became so overwhelming that they were no longer believable.

 

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Further resources: Grand Guignol Online — Le Grand Guignol at Dark Echo — Phantasmic Attractions — The Grotesque in Theater — Le Grand Guignol at Thrill Peddlars — Librairie Grand Guignol (in French) — Fall and Rise: The Grand Guignol

 

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By the Second World War, the theater was beginning to vacillate, carried away by its own excess. The war dealt it its final death blow. Reality overtook fiction, and attendance at post-war performances dwindled. In the spring of 1958, Anais Nin commented on its decline in her diary: “I surrendered myself to the Grand-Guignol, to its venerable filth which used to cause such shivers of horror, which used to petrify us with terror. All our nightmares of sadism and perversion were played out on that stage. . . . The theater was empty.” In an interview conducted immediately after the Grand-Guignol closed in 1962, Charles Nonon, its last director, explained: “We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things — and worse — are possible.”

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*

p.s. RIP Ken Jacobs ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, it went really well in Baltimore. Same thing here: Xmas in early October?! Love peering at you blearily through dense jetlag, G. ** jay, Hey, jay!! Always happy to surprise and even startle. Congrats on divising an un-‘bad’ feast. I guess it’s digested into ever fainter memory by now. Thanks, yeah, good trip but very burnt until I get some decent sleep, but good burnt. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Hope you got home as safely as I did. The ‘Hellraisers’ are a matter of ever diminishing returns unless maybe you smoke a lot of weed. The MIX rejection was a surprise, but we seem to have gotten something else and better for NYC now, we’ll see. ** Misanthrope, Dude, good to see you and Alex and Little Show even briefly. I hope it was worth the drive. ** Jack Skelley, Hm, okay, I’ll give Ty Segal some quality time then. Hazy salute. ** julian, Hi, j. Personally I think ‘Books of Bloods’ are far, far and away his best fiction. I’m not even sure you need to go further. Long ago I asked John Ashbery to sign a book, and he crossed out his printed name, and I thought that was cool in a personalizing way or something, and I just started doing it. Baltimore went well, and I liked the city quite a bit. It looks really good and it feels a good kind of comfortable. Best to you. ** Dev, Happy October to you! Sure, yes, please about the guest-post, but you really don’t need to pitch it unless you want to. If there’s any kind of post you want to make, I’m automatically interested. Thanks a bunch. Baltimore was very cool. ** Carsten, Hi. Baltimore went very well. I’m still in a jetlag cloud, but I’ll check my email for the author’s hopeful response once I’m awoken. Congrats on the poem pub. I’ll be there as soon as I’m worthy of it. Everyone, Carsten’s poem “Hunter’s Curse & Cure” just came out on the Dewdrop here. ** Måns BT, Hey, Måns! I’ve never played ‘Disco Elysium’, no, and maybe I do remember you recc’ing it. It might have been in my long no-gaming phase. Anyway, I’ll seek it. Thanks, pal. I know I keep saying this, but Stockholm film folks are top of my agenda, and now I won’t be traveling for a while, so I predict I will write to them on my hands and knees any second. Watch. xo, me ** Steeqhen, Hey. I can only recommend ‘Books of Blood’, but I’m not a horror-fantasy book reader, so, while the others weren’t for me, I don’t know. Shoot high as a writer, always, but stay logical about how hierarchies work. ** Mark Stephens, It’s weird and sad that we’re not doing an LA Halloween, and weird and not sad that we’re doing a Xmas-adjacent LA, but hey! Love, me. ** ellie, Yes, of course! ** Stil, The flight I had on Icelandic Airlines had a new level of bad entertainment choices, and you wouldn’t believe what I made my eyes absorb. Great about the film openness situation. Have you started on it? ** Pete, Hi, Pete. It’s so nice to meet you, and thank you so much for the great words about my work. What do you do or make and want to make and etc.? I’d be interested to know. Warmest greetings from over here. ** Nicholas., Hi, man. Uh, we’re deep into fall here, as far as I can tell. (I just got back to Paris, and I’m barely awake). Museums, sure, I mean depending on the aim, but, generally, sure. Tired: me too, like, so tired. ** Uday, Me neither until I made the post. And I haven’t watched it. A Mirbeau book, okay, that’s appealing in theory, but I’ll skip it anyway, thank you. ** PL, I had a good time, but I’m so jetlagged I can’t tell if I’m better yet, haha. ** _Black_Acrylic, Haha, I think I remember ‘Nightbreed’ being sufficiently fun, but don’t hold me to it. ** James Champagne, Hi, James. I’ve read almost nothing of his post-heyday, the ‘Weaveworld’ era, etc. He was really fun to interview, very cool guy. ** Uday, I hang my head in shame. I don’t even remember what that film is, but I am barely brain-functioning this morning if that isn’t obvious. Well, you got a good story. ** Laurenz, Hi, Laurenz. Thank you for coming in. Oh, sorry, I’ll go find your email. I can be really bad at email and miss things constantly. I’m very jet lagged this morning, so I won’t subject your email to my brain today, but I’ll find it and get it ready for my mental return. ** Jack, Hi, Jack. Well, I think we’ve just set up a NYC screening for ‘RT’, and I can’t be specific yet other than to say it’ll happen in December. Thanks for asking. ** darbz 🐻, I’m so happy my blog hit the bullseye with your love. I met Clive Barker in the early 00’s and interviewed him. He was very cool. I put the Instagram stories up, but rarely, and usually they’re shared like that one, I didn’t know there was music on that. How strange. Trip was good. Uh, I ate vegan Mexican food and an omelet and macaroni and cheese that made my stomach upset. How do the locks look? Any news from the Halloween job? And thank you for the playlist! I have to wake up more, but I’ll be all over it. xoxo. ** Steve, Hi. Barker’s a gentleman, even though I don’t think he wants to be. No, unfortunately John Waters was away on tour, so I didn’t get to see him. It went very well. Everyone, New episode of Steve’s mighty music podcast is up and ‘this is the most packed one yet, with 33 songs (10 of them being hip-hop). I also played DL Jeff Jackson’s band Julian Calendar’s cover of Green Day’s “longview”’. Here. ** Midnight Matt, Hi! It was really nice getting to meet you and talk to you a bit. Thank you for shlepping all those books to the theater. I really regret that we had to split before the Stevie, Eileen, Derek shebang. Glad and not surprised it was stellar. Good to see you! ** Billfold Cunninghamster, I haven’t seen it, but I so hear you. ** HaRpEr//, Baltimore went great, but I am very zonked out with jet lag so far. Alas. Just in the last several days, Geese seem to have gone totally viral. They’re everywhere. They’re like the thinking person’s Turnstile or something. If you read him, seriously, read ‘Books of Blood’. I wouldn’t start anywhere else. ** nat, I honestly will be a lot better in conversation after I get some actual sleep. ‘Hellraiser’ is fun and cool enough to try to induce amnesia about the Pinhead/hip stuff and buckle down with it, I think. ** Allright. Apologies for all my haziness up above. Halloween continues with a restored look at Grand Guignol. See you tomorrow.

* (Halloween countdown post #2/restored)

 

 

Salome, 1973

 

Forbidden, 1975

“I made two films which went on to be put on video: Salome, which I did when I was 18, and The Forbidden, which I did when I was 19. Both short, dark pieces. Salome is seven minutes long and shot on 8mm; The Forbidden was shot on 16mm, but we printed it in negative because we didn’t have the money to print it in positive. We designed the whole thing to be shot on negative. I was quite surprised to see how many people got something out of them on video. I mean, they’re 25 years old. Basically, I saw Anger’s movies at a very active little film society in Liverpool in the sixties. Liverpool was quite a place to be in the sixties. Ginsberg had come over and called Liverpool the Haight Ashbury of England. It was a place where poets and, obviously, musicians – the Beatles and all the many bands that followed in their wake – were active. So I saw all the Warhols and the Angers and the usual suspects at that time. One of the things it made plain was that all you really needed was a camera. These were not technically very proficient pictures. There was something rather homemade about them, and that was very important to me. At a certain point in your life, you think, “Oh, now, wait a second! I can do this!” And it worked.” — CB

 

 

Rawhead Rex, 1986

“I think, generally speaking, the movie followed the beats of the screenplay. It’s just that monster movies, by and large, are made by directorial ‘oomph’ rather than what’s in the screenplay. I’d like to think the screenplay for Rawhead Rex had the possibility of having major thrills in it. I don’t think it was quite pulled off. The admirers of the movie, and actually there are quite a lot of them, like it as a sort of sixties movie made in the early eighties kind of deal. I don’t think the movie is bad, it had a lot more potential. I just don’t like it very much.” — CB

 

 

Hellraiser 1, 1987

“I think in ‘Hellraiser’, we get away with a lot of stuff which I was kind of surprised by frankly. I was surprised that the MPAA was as accepting of some of that imagery, which is very seriously taken necrophiliac imagery, as it was. Maybe they didn’t get it, I don’t know.” — CB

 

 

Hellraiser 2, 1988

“‘Hellbound’ is a sea of mythological images and allusions. There is the Frankenstein myth – the mad doctor who loses control. There’s certainly the theme of Orpheus in the underworld, the difference being that it is a daughter in search of her father as opposed to Orpheus searching for Eurydice. There is the classic imagery of the labyrinth, the Minotaur and a whole bunch of allusions to other horror movies. But I don’t think any of these things are essential to the picture. They are there for whoever wants them, but for those who want a good time on Friday night, the picture is a roller-coaster ride.” — CB

 

 

Nightbreed, 1990

“The lesson I’ve learned [making ‘Nightbreed’] is that a lot of people don’t want anything different. They don’t want you to have a unique vision. But why make movies anybody else could have done? Well, I’ve paid the consequences, but I’m unrepentant. Again and again I listened to deprecating comments about low literacy levels. There was supposedly no point showing ‘Nightbreed’ to critics because the people who see these movies don’t read reviews, in brackets, even if they can read at all! Immediately it was disqualified from serious criticism. Therefore it had to be sold to the lowest common denominator. Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make. One [old] guy at Fox never saw it through because he felt it was morally reprehensible and disgusting – the two very things it’s not. Their imaginations are limited and they have a very unadventurous sense of what to do. Someone at Morgan Creek said to me, ‘You know, Clive, if you’re not careful some people are going to like the monsters.’ Talk about completely missing the point! Even the company I was making the film for couldn’t comprehend what I was trying to achieve!” — CB

 

 

Hellraiser 3, 1992

“When I first heard about Hellraiser III, it was clear the production company, Trans Atlantic Entertainment, didn’t want me on board for financial reasons. Head honcho Lawrence L. Kuppin wanted his stamp on it, not mine, and he didn’t want me hanging around. I was reasonably expensive and, frankly, I knew he wanted something cheap and nasty. So I did a deal with Miramax, not Kuppin, to remake and remodel the picture the way I wanted to. I added Terry Farrell’s bondage scene at the climax, the monstrous thing coming up through the floor in front of her, the extra computer graphics for the girl being skinned and many insert death scenes for the nightclub victims. Pete Atkins did all the extra writing. I threw in my ideas and everything was cut into the movie. The result is a pretty seamless patchwork, but a patchwork nevertheless. The best one can say about the movie is it’s abundant and there’s loads of fun stuff going on.” — CB

 

 

Candyman, 1992

“I still prefer the short story to the movie, though I am still a great fan of Candyman. Film is the collaborative art. In that case, it was a story created by Bernard Rose and myself based upon the short story. In other words, a marriage of minds.” — CB

 

 

Motorhead Hellraiser clip, 1992

“I did a Motorhead video – Motorhead versus Pinhead! And Doug was playing cards with Lemmy. It was a one-day shoot – seventeen hours – and towards the end he [Doug] came in and everybody was getting rather reverential. It was like, ‘The Lord of Hell is here’. The image carries a kind of potency. It’s almost impossible to shoot Pinhead and not have it look good. It’s one of those images – very, very cold!” — CB

 

 

Candyman 2, 1995

“Bill Condon did a great job on Candyman 2, he really did. We’re really, really happy, and he was always the person I wanted to bring into the project. We had to go the most circuitous route past Propaganda to actually get him on the job, and once they saw what he was doing they wanted to hire him for everything.” — CB

 

 

Lord of Illusions, 1995

“In Lord of Illusions, I got to do all kinds of shit that I wanted to do. The bondage stuff in there, the girl and the ape, all kinds of shit. It’s very funny because Frank Mancuso was head of MGM/UA at that time, and he didn’t like the movie at all. There was one shot of a dead child on the floor, and he said, ‘This shot will never appear in an MGM/UA movie.’ As it turns out, it did, because I took it out, and then when he wasn’t looking, I put it back in. I knew he’d never bother to see the film again.” — CB

 

 

Hellraiser 4, 1996

“Hellraiser 4 is not very good. I think they are making another one. Oh God!” — CB

 

 

Candyman 3, 1999

“Candyman 3, which I had nothing to do with, was shown to me a couple of weeks ago. I declined to put my name on it. I really don’t think I contributed anything to its creation and it seems entirely phony to plunk your name on it, take the money and run. I didn’t think it was a badly created movie, I just didn’t think it had anything to do with the mythology I originally created. I would have felt like a big old fake.” — CB

 

 

Hellraiser 5, 2000

“Hellraiser 5 is terrible. It pains me to say things like that because nobody sets out in the morning to make a bad movie but you know these guys sent me a script and I said if you want me involved ask me let’s do a deal and get into business, but I really don’t think this works right now (talking about the script). They said we really don’t want your opinion on it we are going to make the movie. So they went and made the movie, and it is just an abomination. I want to actively go on record as saying I warn people away from the movie. It’s really terrible and it’s shockingly bad, and should never have been made.” — CB

 

 

Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, 2000

“Excruciating. Not in the good way.” — CB

 

 

Undying, video game, 2001

“In a way, [Undying] does go back a bit to the Books Of Blood, the feelings I had when I wrote those books, which was that there were no rules. There are some things in this game that are just outrageous. Ambrose, particularly in his transformed state, is really just disgusting. I also think, if you look at this game, it’s designed like a movie, it feels like a movie. It’s not brightly colored like a Pokemon game, it has sepias and grays and occasionally eruptions of red.” — CB

 

 

Hellraiser 7, 2002

“We show it to Clive at his house here in LA and Clive loves it. He thinks it’s the best one since II. He gives us some notes on some added shots and inserts he thinks will help, mostly stuff in the third act of the film. At first we get a call from the exec at Dimension on the project and he screams at us for letting Clive see it. But five minutes later we get another call from a higher exec who just spoke to Clive and everything’s cool. They’re thrilled, and relieved, that he liked it. He wanted to give us a nice blurb on the box but he couldn’t for some contractual reasons.” — Rick Bota, the director of ‘H7’

 

 

Hellraiser 8, 2005

“Haven’t seen it.” — CB

 

Hellraiser 9, 2005

“Doug Bradley as Pinhead delivers the goods as per usual, and there are some great gore scenes. Throw in a few clever plot twists and devices and you have yourself a mindless quick little romp. The only problem being that the Hellraiser series has always been a fairly cerebral experience. Again, the feel of the series is just not there. Something is clearly missing from the formula.” — review @ Dread Central

 

 

Demonik, video game, 2006

“It was never released for good reasons” — CB

 

 

Hellraiser: Prophecy, 2006

“Oh, you know, fans made it. Fans are sweet. They’re sweet.” — CB

 

 

Plague, 2006

“Plague was a screw-up. I trusted the director and I wasn’t going to do to Hal what had been done to me by interfering producers over the years; I had pretty much decided I would let him have his way and if we had to have an argument it would be in the cutting-room about the way the picture was cut – so he shoots the picture and then is absent from the cutting-room most of the time. He did a tough job on a very tough schedule but there were things that I begged for at the end, for the producers to throw in some extra money towards Hal so that he could go back and do a couple of extra days’ shooting but they shook their heads and that was the end of that. It is not a movie I am pleased with or proud of – it feels compromised and Hal got in his car and drove away before the picture was even locked” — CB

 

 

Valerie on the Stairs, 2006

“This is a joke – Mick finds this incredibly funny – I wrote a 45-page closely-typed treatment for a 60-page script, so Mick said it was the easiest job he ever had in his life! It’s a story I’ve wanted to write for a very long time and suddenly I realised, ‘Ah, this is the place to put it.’ It’s a very, very heterosexual story, centred around an obscure object’s desire for this exquisite woman, Valerie” — CB

 

 

Haeckel’s Tale, 2006

“It was, if you’ll excuse my French, fucking marvellous. Haeckel’s Tale is a story that I’m very proud of, and Roger Corman did a magnificent job directing it, particularly since it was a period piece and the FX are amazing. It’s pretty intense stuff.” — CB

 

 

Jericho, video game, 2007

“I’m sure I’m a pain in the arse and I’m sure I’m a difficult man to please but on the other hand I think most people that are looking at the material right now are damned pleased they went that extra mile with it… I had right of veto for the music and in March of last year I got a version of the game with music on it, music that I’d never heard before or been asked to hear, or whatever. I went ape shit. Music is such an important part of an experience and this stuff was like going back to gay disco from 1982, which went down like a lead balloon. I knew what the music was. I knew what I wanted it to be. I even had a composer in mind, Chris Velasco, who ended up doing the music and did a fucking fantastic job. It really irritated me that somebody had tried to whisk this by me without my being told. I have my name on this game and I’m very proud of it and I’d have done whatever I needed to do and if that means being a pain in the ass – live with it bitch!” — CB

 

 

Midnight Meat Train, 2008

“[Midnight Meat Train] isn’t special effects driven, but there are a lot of effects in the final reel – physical effects, not CGI effects. When they come up, they’ve got to be great, and Patrick [Tatopoulous] has a handle on all that… I’m seeing a lot of what I’ll call ‘soft horror’ around and not a lot of ‘hard horror’ – certainly not from American [filmmakers]. There’s a lot of PG-13s and ghost/apparition kind of stuff. I’ve always liked my horror harder and I thought this was a good time to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this body of stories, let’s bring a different sensibility to horror audiences.’ “ — CB

 

 

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p.s. Hey. As mentioned the other day, tomorrow I’m flying to Baltimore for a few days for a screening of ‘Room Temperature’ (see: right column for details). The blog will be taking a short vacation while I’m gone. It will return to action next Wednesday. ** Carsten, Hey. She’s sadly unknown. But the blog is doing its little part to help change that. We’re kind of expecting a small, unremarkable town (Hof), but that’s ok. Hopefully we’ll spend our time at the festival. I can’t even doze on planes, although the flight back to Paris from Baltimore is an all-night nightmare, so maybe I’ll find a way. I have a query into a BlazeVox author friend, but no news yet. Hang in there in the meantime. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Happy best holiday season absolutely ever to you! Young Silco is very more appealing than his adult incarnation. Poor kid. Love making Clive Barker rediscover his youthful mojo, G. ** Jack Skelley, Nice idea, although I have another assignment in mind for next time. Watch your email. Wow, you’re hitting the music there. I’ve never seen any of those folks live. Sounds nice. I remember the Raveonettes being fun. I thought they were defunct. I get Pulp’s appeal, but I’ve never crushed out on them. LCD Soundsystem, you know, whatever, fun, I guess. I’ve never heard Ty Segal. Weird, no? I was planning to see Factory Floor here, but it’s on the night I get back from Baltimore, and I’ll be dead in my bed. xo, DeniParis. ** Tosh Berman, Oh, shit. Acid reflux is no fun to put it mildly. Let’s see, I took a ton of Mylanta in chewable pill and liquid form. I did yoga to strengthen my stomach muscles. I had to drastically change my diet for a long time, and I permanently had to give up onions and hot sauce and other delicious things. They must have more sophisticated cures by now. Really good luck, Tosh. Mine took quite a while to fade out, but it did. ** Misanthrope, I’m assuming we’ll do a Q&A because that’s kind of what they always do when the filmmakers are in attendance, but they haven’t mentioned anything to us yet. ** PL, Hi there. It has been a while. Great to see you. I’m okay, but I seem to be coming down with a very ill-timed head cold given my imminent traveling, but what can one do. I did a Doris Wishman post here not too long ago. Nice that you and Pedro are communicating. Oh, hm, I don’t actually know about publishers who do illustrated books. I’ll have to think a bit and investigate. But I will. It’ll just take me until I’m back next week. I’ll download your portfolio in the meantime. Thanks! I’m sure there’s a route. Take care, P. ** Måns BT, Måns, old chum, hey there! I love roamy festivals like that. There’s a big annual experimental film festival here that does that. It’s like a treasure hunt. Wow, very cool about the podcast mention. I’ll google Lakidoris and see what I can find. Sweet, thanks for telling me, pal. The Stockholm film people: long story very short: Our producer was preventing us from setting up European screenings for a while because he wanted some kind of big ‘International Premiere’ event to happen first, so everything got waylaid, but that’s a done deal finally. I’m going to do everything in my power to write to the Stockholm people today and greatly apologise and see if they’re still down for showing the film, which would have to be in January at this point because the film is really booked up until then. Hopefully they’ll be okay with that. I think you’re cc’ed on my emails with them, so you’ll see. Zac and I really want to show the film there, so hopefully they aren’t fed up with us. Love and kisses in triplicate back to you! ** Uday, Oh, shit. No one else mentioned the image loading issue, so maybe your computer was just temporarily lazy yesterday, I hope? Sorry you’ve been unwell, but respect on your having exploited that artistically. I’m getting sick today myself, but it’s a cold, and they don’t tend to be very muse-like in my experience. Your film club sounds like plenty of fun. Where do you want to lead them? Sébastien Roch, no, I don’t know his stuff. ‘Just kinda fine’ … dare I take the plunge? ** Steeqhen, Hi, Steeqhen. She’s good. It’s good. Clothes get moldy? Wait, okay, I guess they can. Can that kind of mold make you sick? I’ve accidentally eaten moldly cheese and lived, but that’s probably different? I don’t know. Sounds like a good pitch to me. I hope they bite. ** Mark Stephens, Hey, Mark! Miss you, man. Zac and I will be there in December to show ‘Room Temperature’ again — you should come — and we can sort out a meet up then for sure. Love to you, old friend. And to Julie, natch. ** Hugo, Right, that mansion video. Who in the world thought that one up. I don’t even own my apartment. All I own is an old car and bunch of books and records. Oh, wow, my theme park would put Georgia at the center of the known world, I swear. ** HaRpEr //, ‘Olga’s House of Shame’, noted. Nice title. Neo post-rock: Is that like Kneecap and … what’s their name, those two older Irish guys … ? That seems true about literature defying the art tag more than films or music. Strange. I guess people have always had a hard time seeing language as an art form. Or solely language. People are so into being social and talking in shorthand now, and books tend to inspire and even require full sentences and paragraphs, except for, like, ‘You read Ocean Vuong?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘So good.’ ‘Yeah.’ ** Eric C., It’s a beaut: Paris. Bob Mould was maybe going to do the score for that terrible ‘Frisk’ film, but he ultimately declined, and the score was by Coil and Lee Ranaldo. No, I never saw Husker Du live, which is really strange, and I don’t why that never happened. I didn’t see Bob live until Sugar. Well, my all-time favorite film is Bresson’s ‘The Devil, Probably’, so you could start there maybe if you can find it. Other especially great or favorites of mine: ‘Mouchette’, ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’, ‘Lancelot du Lac’, … I could go on. ** Stil, I’m excited now too. I’ll have to wait until I’m back from Baltimore unless they’re in-flight entertainment, which is not impossible. I love the cowboy zine if I didn’t already say so. ‘Twin Peaks’ meets Richard Siken sounds really strange and promising. Excited about your experimental film project, of course. Do you have total freedom? Do they give you equipment and stuff? ** DonW, Howdy, Don! Her films are hard to see in full. She’s one of those filmmakers who wants them to be projected, understandably, but it does make things tough. ‘Beyond Utopia,’ I’ll see if I can find that. I’m way down for Qs, of course. I’ll be back in the saddle if probably a little hazy in the brainpan on Wednesday. Take care. ** adrian, Bonjour adrien! Happy that I’m not the only busy one. What’s your busyness? At the moment, the only screening up your way is in Ghent on November 1st, but there’s a distinct possibility of showing the film in Rotterdam that we are currently pursuing, so hopefully that’ll happen. Beautiful-est day to you! ** Okay. Halloween’s back in the form of a restored thingeroony about Mr. Clive Barker and his varying stuff. Enjoy, and I’ll see you back here come Wednesday.