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HORROR FROM THE YEAR 2000! |
Be patient. The timeline on this is going to leap around like an iguana with a tattooing needle up its ass. Let's start with the distant past: The last broadcast television series I can recall watching regularly was Kolchak: The Night Stalker. That is to say, Kolchakwas the last show for which I ever changed my schedule, or rearranged my Friday nights. Since that far-away time whole TV series have come and gone, programs that form fundamental life-experience for many viewers ... shows about which I just don't give a crap. From M*A*S*H to N.Y.P.D. Blue, from The Simpsons to South Park, from Friends to The Sopranos, you couldn't find me less interested. There's an exception, of course ... and we'll come to it. Back when Kolchak gasped through its poorly-rated single season of 20 episodes on ABC, one-hour television shows were generally written according to a four-act template, accounting for commercial breaks and supplying a minor climax at the end of Act One to hold the viewer through the first set of ads. For the Act Two break — the middle point in the hour — a slightly stronger climax was required because the viewer had to wait through twice as many commercials. Then another minor climax to wrap Act Three, then home. When syndicated series proliferated in the 1980s, paving the way for mini-networks like UPN and Fox in the 1990s, more ad breaks came along, necessitating six or seven climaxes of varying intensity for a one-hour show. And they say there's no sex on TV, with all those climaxes. By 2000, the Federal Communications Commission — that assembly which governs our supposedly "free" airwaves and sells them to the highest bidders — enacted legislation permitting a total of 15 minutes, 44 seconds of commercials per broadcast hour. Watch any network's "lineup" from 7 p.m. till 11 p.m., and you've just spent more than an hour of your time watching advertising. This may be what makes America great, but it can also make your patience evaporate the way ectoplasm does whenever James Randi strolls into a haunted room. Hence, I videotape everything, and await the advertisement-choked leisure of no program. Cueing ahead through reams of commercial tripe and lame-ass ballyhoo is a small joy in a mostly joyless world. Just when the laserdisc medium had delved deep enough to mine a worthwhile stratum of movies, DVD rolled along to outmode it right on schedule. I own fewer than five laserdiscs, and never found anything on them that wasn't also available on tape. The important thing about laserdiscs is that in the past decade their existence has helped redefine the presentation of movies for home consumption, which is why letterboxing is growing commonplace on premium channels, and why supplements are turning up on "normal" TV as "making of" specials, and the (so-called) Independent Film Channel features the audio commentaries from laserdiscs. I've even done a few audio commentaries myself, usually for laserdisc companies that don't bother to thank you even with a comp copy. When the laserdisc canon finally outgrew the short-term, usual-suspect output of hit movies, classic movies, and cherished children's favorites, and ventured into the more intriguing realm of stuff like From Hell It Came or the uncut Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, or, at last, an "augmented" Alien (with lost footage that had been tantalizing the imagination for nearly two decades), its value as a accessible medium became obvious, and, for the first time, useful. Just as the DVD invasion commenced, I got to write liner notes for the Box Office Spectaculars laserdisc edition of Lucio Fulci's Cat in the Brain, a movie no one would have bothered to immortalize on laserdisc ten years ago. You may hate it, but it's incontrovertably in a realm beyond an entry-level taste for movies. One laserdisc could also make hundreds of nearly perfect tapes for trade among collectors whose interest in such topics areas as the film oeuvre of Al Adamson or the collected works of Hugo Haas was the reason they were called "enthusiasts" in the first place. Laserdiscs helped create a new breed of movie snob — the kind that blathers on and on about home theatre sound separation and how scan lines present themselves on this mega-screen TV or that plasma display. There's nothing wrong with focusing on what the equipment can do instead of what it cannot; it can do a great deal, and a lot of what it can do is pretty impressive ... but what it cannot do is show you motion pictures the way most of them are meant to be presented. Yet. Soon, maybe, considering the possibilities of digital-download. But not right now. (Billy Wilder recently admitted he had not viewed his own 1950 classic, Sunset Boulevard, in many, many years. Why? Because did not wish to watch his own movies on a TV screen when they were conceived to be presented in a certain scale, to be seen in the dark. He also noted that it might be nice to see the film again with an audience. And so it came to pass that a new print of the movie was struck for a special afternoon screening at the flagship venue of the American Cinematheque, the lavishly-restored and updated Egyptian Theatre, where Wilder, now wheelchair-bound and in his mid-90s, received not one, but two standing ovations from a near-capacity crowd.) What TV-sized movies can do best is provide a good enough fake of motion pictures to satisfy the needs of somebody in Iowa who wants to watch the latest Indiana Jones or Star Trek movie with lots of really loud explosions. Technology will always pursue mass audience needs first, then refine to the tastes of aficionados later — if it lasts. Go into any laserdisc or DVD emporium and check out the showroom systems; it's nearly always Armageddon or Gone in 60 Seconds or Con Air or Terminator 2 blasting from a zillion speakers surrounding a screen the size of a Lincoln Continental. Will it be showing a letterboxed edition of Lawn Dogs or Open Your Eyes? Fat chance. That's what is meant by "the mass market." Some will argue that what TV-sized movies cannot do is make that guy or gal in Iowa into a cineaste, no matter how good their system is, or how bad their French. Both the pro and the con view have something going for them. For one thing, my earliest memories of movies are from movie theatres, but my earliest recall of monster movies is from seeing them on television, back when disbelief was easy to suspend over commercial breaks for used car lots, and everything was in black and white because that's the way the TV depicted the world (there were color sets, of course, because I'm not that ancient. But not at that time, and not in my house). On the other hand, today, I along with a cadre of like-minded individuals engage in the Friday night ritual provided by the availability of a fairly decent studio screening room. It is in this theatre I saw a print of The Phantom Menace, the day after it opened nationwide; our audience topped out at five people who did not have to wait months out in the elements. In this venue we savor weird items like the 3 1/2-hour version of Das Boot, or a Warner Bros. print of Them! from 1954 that still has the color title sequence, or Evil Dead with noteworthy cast and crew members in the audience. For these screenings we enjoy the undivided attention of an actual projectionist, who, among other things, executes reel changes the old-fashioned way. Believe me, cineastes, there is a difference. (Just ask Billy Wilder.) I first encountered DVDs in Hong Kong, just as the first players were becoming affordable, and the Taiwanese typically took it upon themselves to bootleg every movie already available (where else? on laserdisc). Lusting for the sort of push-come-shove enjoyed by big biz when CDs elbowed aside LP record albums, seemingly in a week, producers and distributors jumped enthusiastically into the now, with-it, au-go-go DVD industry, even though their encryption scheme was so elementary it could be busted by an eighth grader in less time than it takes to chug a Big Gulp. After a couple of initial missteps — like DIVX — DVDs became this week's gold standard, essentially a cumbersome laserdisc rendered down into the same size as a CD, which was identical in diameter to a CD-ROM, and it did not take a billionaire software savant to figure out why. The growth and boom period for DVDs was as compressed as a big file sent by e-mail — roughly the time span between the death of DIVX and the rise of the fabulously affordable Apex 600-A, the DVD player that singlehandedly shitcanned all country codes and copy-protection. It's as easy to copy DVDs now as it is to burn a CD on home equipment; it's all really just a question of available memory, and we all know that's the computer problem that disappears the fastest. Now that distributors are invested so heavily in DVD that they have to keep pumping out product despite their laughable copy protection, this means a vast boon for the home duplicator. The digital download solution is fascinating because all that is required is a single good copy of any film that can be accessed by anyone who wants it, on a theatre-by-theatre, or even a customer-by-customer basis. With all this glittering tech proffering a nearly limitless horizon, why even bother with broadcast TV, which is still a dinosaur in search of its final tar pit? Because that's what most people watch. For every person cabled up to VH1 or yanking the Sci-Fi Channel down from a dish, there are a hundred who are still wrapping tinfoil around the rabbit ears of their 13-channel black and white sets for better reception. For every person visiting Fangoria's brand-new website, there are a thousand who've never been online in their lives. Like broadcast TV, the internet is basically a bold new frontier ... of advertising. Expect to see more of it. Yes, if there's one thing there is more of on the World Wide Web than pictures of naked or near-naked people doing things some might deem "pornographic," it's advertising — vast resources deployed with the single aim of convincing you to buy stuff. Several companies once part of what used to be called New York publishing have already emplaced deals by which books can be made available electronically, for free — so long as the reader is willing to endure a constant stream of adverts alongside the text. And the clock grinds on. This passage of time caused my downfall from TV series celibacy. I got blindsided, nailed, flattened, and hopelessly addicted. I can't not look at VH1's Where Are They Now? Ten years ago, this show would have flopped. Today, just enough time has passed to make the participants seem like loopy visitors from another world, and most of them hail from Planet Eighties; one loser band after another, each reciting their tale of woe as if from a giant Mad Lib of a script with their band names pencilled into blank spaces, an endless litany of one-hit wonders who drank and drugged and fornicated into the usual crash-and-burn, lost their hair, gained beer bellies, survived rehab, and are now busily at work on a brand spankin' new clean-and-sober, better-than-ever album. My god, is this show a laugh riot. A good companion series for some of the bands that make the cut should be titled Where Were They Then? Things have changed since 1974, when Kolchak debuted and disappeared in less than a semester. It's a different world for the horror fan of this century compared to that of the last. Aficionados like John Scoleri, co-founder of the essential genre magazines The Scream Factory and bare•bones, can still recall "having grown up in the end of the video-less era ... staying up late to catch movies like Night of the Living Dead or Planet of the Apes in the middle of the night." "So many (horror) films," John said, "were never-to-be-seen, existing solely as stills or plot descriptions to tease us. Based on the lurid titles alone, I always wanted to see films like The Living Dead Girl, Playgirls and the Vampire, or Nude for Satan." Today, just about every weird flick imaginable, foreign or domestic is readily available. While compiling the rigorous index for Wild Hairs — the long-dreaded book version of every single "Raving & Drooling" column that ever appeared in Fangoria, plus a ton of extra stuff — I realize just how many of the movies inaccessible to me even five years ago are now just a rental visit or mouse click away. Even the long-lost John Agar monster melodrama Hand of Deathhas resurfaced after missing in action for nearly 40 years. "But," as John (Scoleri, not Agar) added, "to walk into any video store and find them all competing for my dollar, well, it's harder and harder to justify the expense. Even if I buy them all, then it's a matter of having them competing for my viewing time. Completing the quest for the Holy Grail of video — for me it was years of searching for things like Spider Baby, or a widescreen copy of The Last Man on Earth or Assault on Precinct 13 — always added to the appreciation of the treasure." Today, I can get all the things John cites in less than 24 hours. Today, John administrates my official website, a damned-near inevitable adjunct to almost any writer's commercial presence, as the century turns. Mine is called BLACK LEATHER REQUIRED and can be found at Thanks to a lot of paranoia in Colorado involving nitwits with firearms, many computers, including those in schools, are prohibited or blocked from opening sites with dangerous, hot-button words in their titles, like "gothic," or "black" or "dark" or (in one hilarious case) "wet." To this end, Gothic.net Masta Whipcracka Darren McKeeman has emplaced a number of back-doors, including www.untoashes.net/~chromo Nonetheless, employee-monitoring software from Telemate.com immediately pegged BLACK LEATHER REQUIRED as a "pornographic" site. This is not necessarily a downside, because as we embark upon the 21st Century, don't forget that pictures of naked people — not advertising — is what really makes the internet go 'round.
Excuses for Dave to write another Fangoria article, sort of a "Raving and Drooling" redux: (1) Fabricate some sort of symmetry between the fact that Fangoria's 200th issue and the year 2000 differ by only one numeral. (2) Do one of those ultra-boring "where is horror as the century turns" pieces, since similar writeups from 1900 proved so timeless. The rest of the message is still missing, as we creep up on the Year 2001.
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