Death Note: Rules, principles, and the purpose of a remake

Oh, hello friends.  I didn't see you there.  Please, come in.  At the time of writing, I just finished watching the Death Note remake on Netflix and it proved to be the perfect material to break the ice on this long-forgotten snark platform of ours.

(I wish I could say this is the start of regular blogging here again, but that tragically seems unlikely.  I do have a twitter now, and of course the blogqueen has been tweeting prolifically for years.  We'll see if I can follow in her illustrious keysteps.)

Death Note (The American One, Mostly)

(Content: death, murder, sexual assault, misogyny.  Fun content: that depends on how much you missed me.)

I feel like any adaptation--whether it's book to film, or a series reboot or reimagining, whatever--has two extra criteria for judgment that original creations can ignore: 

1. Does this story stand on its own, without already knowing the source material? 
2. What value did the adapters get by changing whatever they changed?

And I feel like, regardless of one's opinions on the original story, the American Death Note fails completely on both of these points.  Its protagonist, Light, is changed in bizarre ways that sabotage the thesis of the original, while the supporting leads Mia and L are burdened with new rubbish flaws all too typical for the treatment of women and black men in US cinema.

Death Note (as in 'notebook') started out as a hit manga, which got turned into a hit anime, which got turned into a bunch of other supplementary materials and movies and such, all of which were Japanese and all telling the same core story of high school student Light Yagami, who gains magical murder powers and gets into a years-long battle of wits with law enforcement as he slaughters hundreds of criminals for the supposedly greater good.  It was far from perfect, but it was compelling and creative, telling a story of a seeming paragon of his community who didn't need to be corrupted--he just needed the opportunity to be evil and he'd drag himself down without a blink.  In the name of saving the world from dangerous criminals, he'd kill innocent people to cover his trail, to protect himself, or just to make a point.  He'd manipulate people's emotions, twist and control them, sure of his own perfection and his justified ends.

Light Yagami is a model student, a star athlete, an Encyclopedia Brown-grade genius who helps his cop father solve crimes, and gorgeous heartthrob with legions of girls swooning over him.  He might have gone on to become a brilliant lawyer or miracle doctor or follow his dad's path and be a legendary detective, but he finds a magic book that can kill people and he thinks why not be a god?  Death Note is a story about how someone who's basically modern nobility might actually be the worst kind of monster.  (Before it meant anything else, 'aristocracy' meant 'rule by the best people'.  Sometimes we have to remind ourselves not to trust that idea.)

Light Turner, the protagonist of the Netflix movie, is not this*.  Instead of the outwardly perfect superman, he's a standard American teen protagonist: a nerdy outcast, smarter than bullies but still getting into trouble, with a recently-dead mother and a crush on a cheerleader.  Where the original story makes the Yagamis a magazine-perfect family with mom, dad, and 2.3 kids, Light Turner lives with his dad in a tiny house next to a freight rail line for no apparent reason.  Class politics aren't part of this story, it's just a truth universally acknowledged that a sympathetic teenage protagonist comes from a working-class family.

Where Light Yagami showed vulcan-ish logic and emotional control, Light Turner is every inch the awkward teen, ineffectively confronting bullies and stuttering when pretty girls acknowledge his existence.  Where Light Yagami started experimenting with the killing book of his own accord and didn't hesitate to start offing detectives getting too close to his trail, Light Turner has to be pushed into using it for the first time (to rescue another student), and ultimately goes through the whole movie without killing anyone who hasn't already committed some ghastly crime.  (His second kill is the mafia goon who killed his mom in a traffic accident, who apparently went free because the mob bribed the jury.)

I spent most of the movie trying to figure out if the adaptation writers had intentionally chosen to make their protagonist nothing like the original, or if they thought we were supposed to sympathise with Light.  I think it was intentional, but good lord, at what cost?  Let's talk about the women of Death Note.

Light's mom is not significant in the original story, and she's already been killed for plot fodder in this one.  Other women were mostly extras or quickly killed.  His sister got left out of this version entirely.  The only major female character in the original is Misa Amane, a model who hero-worships Light for killing her parents' murderer and becomes his willing accomplice and nominal girlfriend.  She's clever by normal standards but, of course, foolish compared to proper geniuses like Light, and thus spends most of the story being his willing plaything, killing as he directs and absorbing whatever casual cruelty he shows because she just wants to be useful to him.  It's awful, and the audience is meant to condemn Light for his treatment of her, even if she is also a killer.

In this version, Misa becomes Mia Sutton, and she is the Real Villain of the story.  Mia is the one who pushes Light to kill more people, more publicly, to kill anyone who dares challenge him, and possibly manipulates his emotions to keep him on her side.  I'm sort of impressed that the adapters managed to substantially increase female agency while also keeping the misogyny, and even bumping it from 'evil people mistreat women' to 'the only woman is pure evil'.

Mia is introduced early in the story as the cheerleader that Light watches from the sidelines like an earnest shy creeper.  He's shocked that she knows his name (as American movie tradition demands), and the minute she shows any interest in the book he's reading, he tells her everything about it.  He even declares that she "of all people" should understand the potential of the book, indicating she has some important backstory that got cut from the final version of the movie.  They talk about being able to bring peace to those who have been let down by cops and politicians, and inventing a god of justice to make people too scared to commit crimes.  And then they have sex, because (again) American movie tradition demands it.

[Light and Mia sneak past his dad, sleeping in front of the TV, and up to his room.  Light leans toward her, then hesitates.] 

LIGHT: Can I kiss you? 

MIA: You're not supposed to ask. 

ME: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

We actually have scenes where they are actively making out or undressing each other while googling war criminals to kill off.  This is just apparently their fetish. (ERIKA NOTE: Just saying, Drawn Together picked "murder and wreckage" as a fetish for one of their episodes and probably handled it better. That is not a high bar.)  They also decide their murdersona needs a name--where the Japanese public just started referring to the force murdering all these criminals as Kira ("killer") in the original, Light intentionally chooses the name in this version, with the justification that it means 'light' in Celtic and Russian, and then tries to use the Japanese connection to throw off suspicion.  It doesn't work, and that's when we meet L.

In all versions of this story, L is the counterpart to Light.  Light appears normal, trustworthy, and pretty, and he is an utterly amoral murderer-protagonist.  L is weird, no one trusts him, he looks creepy, and he's the virtuous antagonist.  He's Light's only intellectual equal, tracking down an untraceable killer just as fast as Light can cover his tracks.

Like everything else in this story, the adapters appear to have missed or ignored the point.  Even just consider the following:

Pictured: the live-action American Light played by Nat Wolff, an archetypal gawky Movie Teen, next to the cool and precisely styled anime version of Light.

Pictured: the anime L, an unkempt man with an unsettling stare, and his American live-action counterpart, Lakeith Stanfield, who is more attractive than any human really needs to be.

Granted, apart from making L hot, the adaptation's initial depiction of him is pretty solid.  He's still eccentric, still obsessed with sweets, and they even cast a black actor in this heroic role (I'm generally for this!).  We find him inspecting a Japanese crime scene (cameo by producer Masi Oka) and then boarding a jet with his assistant, the elderly Watari, the only character who stayed Japanese through this adaptation.  L is a Sherlock-esque consulting detective, smart enough to have already narrowed down Kira's true location to Seattle.

(While the original story spends immense time on the details of Light and L's battles of wits, this movie glosses over most of them for the sake of time.  I will summarise because I have a question.  L realised that, before the Kira name started going around, a guy in Seattle in a standoff with police suddenly set his hostages free and then died in a convenient traffic accident, inexplicable events typical of Kira's murders.  To confirm his theories, L started seeding older criminal files into police databases in the Seattle region, and Light apparently used one of those to kill off gangsters in Japan.  When we first see L, he's examining a club where said gangsters appear to have killed each other, but the staff working the club are also dead.  Light wouldn't have been writing the names of the club dancers or waiters unless they were also violent criminals.  Was that just literally a Villains-Only club, or did a bunch of innocent people get killed as well?  That's not supposed to be how the Death Note works.  It has rules.  It has so many rules.**)

Once L arrives, the hunt for Kira amps up, and Light realises he's being tailed by an FBI agent (on the grounds that Light may have access to the police database, which they know Kira does).  Light, as our sympathetic protagonist, gets scared and wants to stop using the Death Note entirely, even though public faith in the justice of Lord Kira is taking off.  Mia says they just have to find out who all of the agents on the team are and kill them simultaneously, to scare off further investigation without implicating Light specifically.  Light is shocked, shocked to hear Mia suggest they use murder to solve their problems.  He's a sympathetic protagonist, after all!  All he's done is kill a few hundred bad guys.  That's what American heroes are supposed to do!  But Mia isn't an obedient girlfriend in this one--she steals a page from the book and kills the FBI agents herself, while Light just thinks it was the work of Ryuk.

(I haven't mentioned Ryuk until now because, in this version of the story, he's basically irrelevant.  Ryuk is the death god who originally owned the book, and he pushed Light to initially use it to kill the school bully who was at that moment threatening to rape another student.  In the original story, of course, Light needs no tempting, and Ryuk mostly exists so Light has an audience surrogate to explain his schemes to.  In this version, he has Mia to help with plot exposition, and she handles the corruption for him too.)

In the aftermath of the agents' mass "suicide", Light's cop father makes a public challenge to Kira, and when he doesn't die for it, L immediately concludes that Light is the killer.  (They have a showdown which is actually pretty good, because Lakeith Stanfield is a top-notch actor.)  To save himself, Light uses the book to compel Watari to go find L's real name.  (The book can "influence" someone's actions for up to two days before killing them, but One Time Only you can burn a page from the book to spare someone's life even after condemning them, so Light is planning to save Watari once he's got the information he needs.  Light's a protagonist, after all, and therefore a good guy!)

I said at the start that adaptations need to stand on their own without knowing the original version***, and this is once of the places where Death Note faceplants.  In the original story, L and some of his colleagues have a complicated and mysterious backstory that is only occasionally hinted at over the course of many chapters.  In this version, the compelled Watari phones up Light and hypnotically explains that L is an orphan raised in a special program that conditions its subjects from childhood to become ultimate detectives.  L was only initiated into the program when, at the age of six, he was able to endure the requisite seven months in solitary confinement without a complete mental breakdown.

That's...

Uh...

Look, in a fifty-episode anime or a hundred-volume comic book, okay, I guess you can spread out the heavy lifting that it takes to introduce those sorts of concepts organically, but in a robotic monologue from a hypnotised butler in the middle of this movie about the corrupting influence of power, that's fuckin' weird.  (Not to mention also being much more backstory than Mia ever gets!)

The conclusion of this is that L's name can only be found in the abandoned orphanage's records, which the writers could have done without the bizarre Ender's Game For Detectives exposition slam.  Watari goes off to hunt for the name, and his disappearance immediately causes L to crack.  Now, far be it from me to object to rational characters acting irrationally when people they care about are in danger, but for the rest of the movie L becomes an increasingly loose cannon, starting with storming the Turner house to accuse and threaten Light's life face-to-face.  That's not something the original L would ever do, and it's at best uncomfortable that they've decided to add this uncharacteristic emotional unhinging after making him the only significant black character.  (It only ramps up after the plan fails, Watari dies, and L, who hates guns, grabs a gun and steals a cop car to chase down Light.  But I'm getting ahead of myself; there's more feminine evil to discuss first.)

Lest we forget just how incredibly American this version is, the climactic events all occur on the night of the homecoming dance at Light and Mia's school.  There's some very weak misdirection involving a top hat that's supposed to let Light slip away from the dance, get L's name from Watari by phone, and then burn the page to save him, but Light discovers that page has already been taken from his book by Mia.  This knocks Light into realising that Mia, not Ryuk, was behind the deaths of the FBI agents--as she explains, she was "protecting" him, both from the cops and from his own cowardice.  She doesn't want to ever stop meting out death in judgment, so she demands that he make her the official owner of the book.  As insurance, she's written his death into it, but since she stopped him from saving Watari, the One-Time-Only Takeback can still be used to spare him.

(Side note: like a lot of the schemes in this movie, this doesn't actually make sense.  Light knows where the book is; Mia does not.  To save himself, he doesn't have to give the book to her, he just has to go burn his own page.  Mia does have one page that she stole, but that's not the one with Light's name on it.  There's no reason for him to give her the book now.)

A prolonged chase scene across the city ensues.  L manages to corner Light at one point, and Light starts to spill everything, but a random bystander shows up on the scene.  L makes the mistake of saying that he's caught Kira, and rando knocks L out with a plank because he is a true believer in Lord Kira.  Light and Mia have their final confrontation on a Ferris wheel.  Light asks her to Choose Love and give up on the book, but as soon as he's distracted she grabs for it and they both fall from the wheel.  She dramatically lands on a flower stall and dies amidst petals, while Light falls into the harbour and gets rescued.  The page with his name on it 'coincidentally' lands in a literal trash fire.

(There's then an incredibly uncomfortable scene in which a bunch of old white cops tell L that Light, currently hospitalised, is clearly not Kira and that, while L might not get jailed for his false accusation, he should know that he ain't welcome in their town anymore.  In a better movie, that kind of implicit threat would be an intentional reflection of police racism.)

Light wakes up from a two-day coma.  He's alive because everything that just happened was according to his last-ditch plan.  He used the book to compel a couple of sex offenders to rescue him from the water and hide the book while he was in his medically-induced coma, then kill themselves when their job was done.  He wrote his own survival into the book as part of their deaths, which... should not work according to any rule we've seen.  It's a book that kills, not saves.

He also wrote Mia's death in, which he admitted to her during their confrontation, but he insisted that it was a conditional thing that would only happen if she tried to steal the book.  This is presented as if it's something we should believe, but according to the rules as presented to us, the fact that he wrote 'she dies after taking the book' means she was magically compelled to steal the book, even if she really did want to Choose Love instead.  Was that what the writers intended?  Was this supposed to be a tragic mistake or a cover for a sinister plan?

Finally, Light's dad arrives and declares that he's realised Light really was the killer--no one else would have caught the connection, but the mafia goon who killed Mom Turner died right before the Kira business started.  Neither of them seems to know what to do now.  Meanwhile, L continues on his Emotionally And Morally Compromised Quest and searches Mia's home (she seems to have lived alone in an apartment, what was her backstory?!) until he finds the page of the Death Note she stole.  He twitches and cries and laughs as he stares at the page and at the nearby photo of Mia and Light together, obviously trying to decide whether to kill Light or not****.  Ryuk pops up to remark to Light that humans are "so interesting!"--and roll credits.

In summary, the white male protagonist gets rewritten as a misled but principled antihero, the white female lead gets powered up from amoral accomplice to ruthless evil mastermind temptress, and the black hero actually on the side of peace and justice goes on a rampage for revenge because he can't control his emotions.  Nothing remains of the original story of an apparent paragon of humanity becoming an unfathomable supervillain just because someone gave him the chance to act without accountability.

So what exactly was the point of this remake?

---

*When people first heard there was going to be an American remake of Death Note, many people pointed out the worst implications due to cultural differences (like American school mass murders, and the overfilling of US jails with black prisoners).  At least they avoided some of that in this script?  Which isn't to say there isn't still plenty of racism and xenophobia to go around: when we see Kira execute a military commander who's been torturing prisoners, they make sure it's an officer in some east Asian military, not American.  Acknowledging evil within the US army is going too far even for this Super Edgy movie.

**The rules of the Death Note are a central part of the original story, and we get every single one of them in detail over dozens of chapters.  This is a good choice for a battle of wits, because the audience understands exactly what the terms of the game are, and it helps us not feel like conflicts are just being resolved by someone pulling a new superpower out of their ear.  Here in this movie, we get a half-dozen rules and the rest are just blurred past with various exclamations of "Why does this thing have so many rules?"  I can see why they would do that to save time, but it does sort of undercut the characters' supposed cleverness, and Light Turner writes various things that the original rules would never have allowed.

***My personal go-to for failure on this is Star Trek Into Darkness, which wants the audience to be shocked and terrified by the revelation of the name Khan, a character who hadn't been featured anywhere in 30 years, let alone in this storyline.

****They obviously wanted to be able to pick it back up for a sequel if they could.  I'm guessing if they did that, L would in fact kill Light's dad to cause Light to suffer as L has, and then it's back to one-on-one cat-and-mouse between them because no one trusts L or believes Light is Kira.  I would protest the loss of the original conclusion as well ("teamwork > loner geniuses"), if it weren't so obvious that they're hoping to continue this story.

Hallowthon 2016 Anthology: What even is fear

It's the most wonderful time of the year again, friends and readers.  Like I said last October: "There are a hell of a lot of horror movies out there and a lot of the same things to be said about most of them: exploitation cliches with sexualised violence against women, weak women predated upon or protected by strong men, and people of colour treated as expendable for shock value.  Racist stereotypes as a source of villainy.  Sex corrupts the young and then they get murdered while the pure girls maybe survive.  We could do a hundred posts and they would all look basically the same."

So once again it's time for the Something Short And Snappy Hallowthon 2016 Anthology, in which the blogqueen and I provide you with quick notes on a dozen horror movies to swiftly judge them and help you find something worth watching on these cold dark nights.  This year's selection leans a bit towards the surreal and unusual, because that's just the tone 2016 has set for us all.

Detention
(CN: gore, murder, body horror)
Will: Blurbs for this movie describe it like a typical slasher, and the first few minutes make it look like it's going to be an unwatchable slasher--the blogqueen and I both considered whether we just wanted to switch it off.  We did not, and we were rewarded.  This movie is not a slasher.  This movie is a sci-fi Freaky-Friday-swap human-animal-hybrid alien-abduction time-travelling-space-bear reading-ahead-in-the-script-for-your-own-movie carnival of WTF.  I've never been high, but I'm 80% sure Detention makes equal amounts of sense regardless of your level of intoxication.  'Good' and 'bad' cease to be useful descriptors for this movie.  It is an experience that I do not regret including in my life.  That's not a recommendation, exactly.  (It does definitely have a share of jump scares and gore, but they're not the main feature by far.)

Erika: This movie is absurd, and I think I mean that in a good way? I struggle to find words for it, mostly just emphatic hand gestures while I make a series of vaguely confused squeaky noises, but that doesn't translate well to text. If you plan to actually sit down and watch a movie, this one could be a good call.

Hush
(CN: blood, murder)
Will: (Merciful spoiler: the cat is not harmed.  I actually liked most of this movie, so the fear that something would happen to the cat was a major damper.)  A deaf author moves out to a remote country home to work on her second novel, and a masked killer decides to hunt her.  While he's got various advantages, she's smarter and incredibly brave, so the battle of wits that makes up the bulk of the film is actually interesting, rather than just having a lot of a woman screaming as she runs uselessly from an implacable monster.  Most of the fear comes by ambiance and anxiety rather than jump scares.  The third act unfortunately trends back towards typical bloody slasher, and it felt like the writers couldn't decide between three different climactic fights so they just decided to use all of them in sequence.  On the other hand, having a deaf hero means that 90% of the dialogue is signed (if that's something you're looking for in a movie) and while Maddie explicitly views her deafness as a flaw for much of the story, she also--minor spoiler--ends up using the killer's hearing against him in the end, so I would tend to give the movie overall a good score on ability/ableism?

Hellraiser
(CN: Sexual violence, misogyny, gore, torture, murder, dragon)
Erika: I've seen Hellraiser twice now. I tried to talk Will through it, touching on villainous female sexuality, weird fetishes, and at one point a dragon if I remember correctly? I struggle to form a cohesive image of it in my mind. Largely because despite having seen it twice, it doesn't stick that vividly for me. Despite having a female protagonist, the movie is steeped in toxic masculinity. The one male character I actually liked was supposed to be laughed at for not being masculine enough and letting his wife be so awful to him. Because his wife mistreating him is a character flaw for him? It's got the usual sexist nonsense that many horror movies do, and I'm struggling to find anything interesting to say about it. It does have some really cool practical effects, and really gross gore stuff. If you're just in it for the grossness, sure, watch Hellraiser, but like a lot of Classics, you're not really missing anything.

The People Under The Stairs
(CN: Racist language, mutilation, torture, sexual violence, animal abuse. Just--everything. CN for All Of It)
Erika: Okay, so we were watching this movie while playing Sushi-Go, and I sort of only half saw the first half? This is important because I think there were a lot of black ghetto stereotypes in there but I'm not positive. It starts with a little black boy (unfortunately only ever called Fool, because that's what came up when his sister did a tarot reading for him) wrangled into helping case a joint to get money for his mother's surgery. The house they're casing has people who basically own the town and have been gentrifying the poorer neighborhoods.  They've chosen it because apparently they have gold in the basement, and not because they're just going to Robin Hood that shit. What is supposed to be a simple robbery goes very, very wrong when the two adults get killed by the owners of the house, and Fool finds out there is a hoard of pasty teenage boys in the basement. Not a subreddit--they're mutilated by the owners of the house, stolen by the couple (who are actually siblings because this wasn't gross enough already) but deemed "impure".

It's tense, it's gross, and a lot of the actually scary parts come from how deeply fucked up the people in it are. Actual distressed noises were made as I watched it. It does have some troubling issues with racism, but it also seems to be trying and do some interesting things with it? As I said, I missed chunks of the movie so I can't speak with confidence on the topic, but Fool is clever and tenacious and likable. SPOILER: the evil dog does die.

The 2016 American Presidential debate trilogy
(CN: Misogyny, racism, Trump)
Erika: Ok, so I didn't catch the first installment in this terrifying series, but I did see the second two. The whole premise seems laughable at first. A highly qualified woman is running to be president of the US against a bigoted angry cheeto. And they really amp up how absurd the Cheeto is. The viewer is often left wondering: how could anyone take this character seriously? But viral marketing aspect really helps with that, showing support outside of the actual debates on twitter and the like. I think the writers realized that and toned him down in the third installment, but the character still seems entirely unreasonable to me. That said, the meta stuff they've put out with it is what makes it truly horrifying. Have you seen some of those news articles on The Cheeto's actions? And the reactions to it? Pure horror because it starts to just feel so real. I feel and hope their conclusion will be obvious, but those of you able to vote in the US on which of these wins should go out and do so! If only because I'm not convinced the writers realized that The Cheeto isn't a legitimate option and need to understand that he isn't.  Make them understand. Vote him out of existence.


Leprechaun
(CN: Comedic gore and violence,  ableism)
Erika: If you want a movie to put on in the background at your Halloween party that people might occasionally catch half a scene of and go "Wait what?" I highly recommend this one. It is campy and cheesy and absurd and the acting is about on par with porn. At one point they throw shoes at the leprechaun while running away so it has to stop to clean them to buy them time. It doesn't take itself too seriously, which personally I enjoy. I was too sober when I watched it, so I noticed there is one character who the writers wrote as "slow". There are a lot of unfortunate 'fat stupid comedic relief' tropes around him, and I don't think the writers knew they were coding him as autistic. With that in mind, there is some interesting dynamics around how other characters treat and react to him (mostly with kindness and affection). If someone else wants to sit down and actually pay attention to it (I do not recommend that; I was rooting for everyone to die so hard) I'd urge you to consider the accidental layers there as you do.

Doom
(CN: Gore, violence, misogyny, gross monsters)
Erika: If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw me tweeting through this. I'm bitter at the husbeast and the Alexs for making me sit through this when I can't drink and they all can. It opens with MANLY MEN BEING MANLY AND BY THE WAY DID YOU KNOW THEY WERE MEN WITH GUNS AND PENISES WHO ONLY THINK ABOUT PUTTING SAID PENISES AND GUNS IN WOMEN? No, really, that's 90% of the character development. This movie was unsure how seriously it was taking itself, but it was still too seriously. If they had just given up and gone full camp it could have been fun, but they didn't, so it's just kind of a sexist mess. The only named female character who is a doctor is called a "dumb woman" because she believed the people she was working for weren't evil. The Rock is Lawful Evil in deeply unbelievable ways. Karl Urban wins a fight against The Rock which, even having been weakened by CGI, is just not believable. Also Good and Evil are genetic? There is one scene where it goes into first person shooter mode that's absurd and kind of fun, but I'd give this one a pass.

Rites of Spring
(CN: gore, torture, murder)
Will: This is not a story.  This is one third each of two separate stories mashed together, which by my math still leaves us one third short.  One plot starts strong with a Bechdel-passing scene of two women in a bar discussing corporate politics, one trying to decide whether or not to admit that she was responsible for a recent failure after someone else has taken the blame.  They immediately get kidnapped by a gruff old man whose motivations are never fully explained.  I mean, it's not hard to piece together from incidental information: every spring, this small town sacrifices several people to some kind of monstrous entity to magically ensure good farming.  But I suggest a general rule: if your story is such a cliche that you just pull an Avril ("Can I make it any more obvious?") maybe it's such a cliche that you should do better.  The other plot, tangentially related, concerns a small conspiracy of people planning to ransom a rich guy's daughter.  Dunno about y'all, but I don't watch horror movies for disturbingly mundane and realistic murder scenes.  These two plots collide by chance and provide our unexplained monstrous entity with a crew of criminals to kill in the final act.  There's supposed to be something clever going on, because the well-meaning desperate dude in the ransom gang is the guy who took the fall for the captured heroine's mistake at work, so maybe they were going for some kind of weird reap-what-you-sow thing (that coincidentally suggests that our Final Girl brought all this horror on herself)?  There is a distinct lack of ending as well, although not as grievously as our next entry:

The Midnight After
(CN: blood, death, rape)
Will: A Hong Kong horror movie that I didn't realise was supposed to be satirical until I read its wiki page.  To again spare you my pain, let me say first that this movie literally has no ending and none of the weirdness is explained, which makes it all weird for weirdness' sake, and I don't know if I don't get it because I'm not from Hong Kong or what.  Which is too bad, because it's mostly pretty good weirdness: seventeen people riding a bus together at 2:30am find themselves abruptly alone in the world and desperately try to figure out what's going on.  Time travel?  Ghosts?  Some kind of magic disease?  A nuclear disaster?  David Bowie?  The answer appears to be 'yes to all' (especially Bowie), except that the movie ends as the survivors finally get on the road to finding possible answers, so we don't actually know.

There is a plotline that definitely requires some further discussion, because amongst all the other mystery and death, one woman is found dead and apparently raped, and we then later see that scene play out in flashbacks as the rapist is revealed by his accomplice.  I'm not sure why the writer thought this was an important thing to have, but the treatment of it is at least decent?  The actual scenes are played for revulsion rather than titillation, the victim isn't stripped for the camera or anything.  To my particular surprise, while some of the other men briefly argue for "rape is bad but what are we going to do about it now, kill him?", the women respond with "yeah, I have a knife right here" and everyone agrees this is as close to a court of law as they can manage when they're the only people in the world.  The actual execution is variously played for pathos and grim humour as each person stabs him once, some more enthusiastically than others.  The whole thing still feels rather unnecessary (fewer pointless rape plotlines in anything, please) but ultimately I can only complain so much about characters agreeing that rapists get no mercy.

It Follows
(CN: blood, death, sexualised violence)
Erika: There was so much hype about this movie, and it really didn't live up to it. I feel there was a lot of symbolism and depth this movie thought it had that I just wasn't getting. Like, I know the pools/water imagery was supposed to mean SOMETHING, but I'm not 100% sure what. Is that supposed to represent the main character's relationship with her sexuality? Peace of mind? There were some aspects I loved: the main character, upon becoming an assault victim, is rallied around by everyone rather than dismissed and questioned.  Although people do at first question if she is literally being followed by a demon or something, they don't try to talk her out of her fear, they just try to make her feel safe, which is refreshing. It would be more refreshing if consensual sex didn't lead to murder demons, but you know, take wins where we can. I also liked how the women were often shown in typical horror movie girl poses/outfits (the opening scene has a woman in a sheet tank top, shorts, and heels running around) but rarely are they filmed as sexy. We see Jay in underpants or a swimsuit often, but she's shown in granny panties and a one piece. The girls aren't wearing loads of make up that were supposed to believe is just what they look like. Their clothes aren't skintight and played off as comfortable and casual. It's weird, and worth a watch, but I wouldn't put it at the top of my list.

Will: The premise of 'what if the Terminator was an STI' is certainly horrifying, and the movie is pretty visually effective, but like the blogqueen I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the writers made various choices.  Was there a ton of symbolism I was missing?  If the monster takes the shape of 'whatever it thinks will get it close to you', why does it keep picking such bizarre and creepy forms instead of something compelling and comforting?  It does sort of do that eventually, appearing as the protagonist's father, but it has previously appeared as completely naked people (first female, then male), or as apparent murder victims, or various other disturbing forms.  Mostly I feel like this movie suffers because the problem becomes a sort of logic puzzle, like "Couldn't you make a deal with someone in Asia where you fly there every year or so to have sex, passing the curse back and forth, so that every time the monster finally climbs out of the Marianas Trench it suddenly realises it has to change direction again?"  And the characters never really try to get clever with the solution like that, so I'm just left with more thought experiments that I can't see in action.

The Devil's Hand
(CN: blood, nudity, brief sexual assault)
Will: Both better and worse than I expected.  The setting is an Amish commune in the modern day, where they have a prophecy about 'the Drommelkind' (devil child?) that seems to start coming true when six girls are all born on the same night.  There is much muttering and grumbling about whether they can be redeemed or should be killed for everyone else's protection.  So, there's the pretty swift Bechdel pass when most of our main characters are women, and it's at least sort of interesting to have Amish characters not presented as inherently backwards and wrong--but there are also the tiresome standbys like the Evil Stepmother, and the horror sequences mostly consist of the girls dying one by one at the hands of a hooded figure.  The primary antagonist is the leading elder of the town, who we also quickly and clearly see is a creeper and probably repeat molester, and there was some potential for interesting dynamics when one of the girls insists they rally people against him while others cling to excuses and veneers of religious purity.  Overall, I was hoping this was going to be a movie that argued 'the devil' is unnecessary when we're capable of justifying evil to ourselves in the name of righteousness, and maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy where it's the moral panic and vicious response that causes disaster after all... but that is not what we get.  The final scenes of the movie don't make a lot of sense (the killer's identity is easy to spot on a meta level, but comes out of nowhere plotwise) and, like Ender's Game, we're sort of left wondering whether the story is claiming the 'bad guys' were right after all or what.

Mr Jones
(I'm not sure any particular warnings apply, but I'm open to suggestions)
Will: This is that rarest of creatures: the bloodless horror movie.  Our protagonists are a young couple whose marriage is a bit rocky, who decide to move out to the middle of nowhere for a year to film the Greatest Nature Documentary Of All Time and discover that their closest neighbour is a famously reclusive anonymous artist dubbed "Mr Jones".  Of course, Mr Jones isn't actually an artist; he's some kind of supernatural sculptor with ulterior motives involving the world of dreams and nightmares.  I really don't know why the writers decided this needed to be done in 'found footage' style, especially since they abandon it repeatedly, but I still enjoyed several aspects of the movie.  Rather than being a stock Nagging Wife, Penny actually gets to have some depth and agency, and she's at least as important to the investigation as Scott.  The aesthetics are satisfyingly creepy without falling back on blood, and after spending the first act shouting "Your neighbour is clearly a killer warlock" at the protagonists, I was gratified by the slow realisation that the expected cliches didn't apply.  It's not as striking and artistic as it wants to be, but overall I approve.

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That's all we were able to get our hands on this month, but as a supplement the blogqueen also suggested this list (by quality individual Joey Comeau) of horror movies without sexual violence.  And at some point we really will post something in regards to Scream Queens, the comedy/horror/satire slasher series that occasionally does interesting things with terrible people.  It'll be surprisingly deep for something that is intentionally super shallow.

You realize this is assault, right?

I'm sure many of you by now have heard about the Kickstarter, Above the Game (If not, here). It's basically funding a "how to assault and rape women" guide, and Kickstarter didn't pull it, or stop it. THANKS KICKSTARTER! They later offered an apology that, as far as corporate apologies go, was pretty good and threw a huge chunk at RAINN. I'm going to be watching them like a hawk in the future, but they get a pass, for now. However, that isn't what this post is about. This post is telling you guys a story about what actually happens when guys do this sort of thing. This is what it can feel like when men start taking the type of advice seduction manuals offer.

It was five years ago, I had written my last exam days ago, was days out of a long term relationship, and it was my friends birthday. I tend to have mostly dude friends, so going out to the bar with only women was new to me. That part of the night was fine, and many of the girls left early, so it was myself, the birthday girl, and one of our other classmates, still looking for adventure. We wandered around downtown, none of us having been in the city for too long by that point, and came across a pool hall. It was busy enough, but quiet. You could easily have a conversation. The type of place that under different circumstances, I probably would have gone back to at a later date.

There were a few groups of people shooting pool, mostly mixed, and one group of men right by the door. They perked up when they saw girls come in. I have still never done the "pick up a random dude at a bar" thing, and flirting with strange men in anything but a social situation always sort of freaks me out. Just never been how I operate, I guess? Being JUST OUT OF A LONG TERM RELATIONSHIP and with two single and definitely on the prowl ladies, that was about to change.

"Mmmmmmmmmmm, him," said my one friend, pointing at a guy with a hat. I thought he was the cutest, too.

"I like him," said the birthday girl with a giggle, pointing at a large, muscular bald man. Having always preferred the nebbish, lanky, goofy type he was very much not up my alley. Apparently, I was very much up his. I would find out later he was an off-the-boat Russian accountant named Eugene who was 4-5 years older than we were. The guy in the hat wandered over to chat up my one friend, leaving the birthday girl and I alone with Eugene. She was half in the bag, I was not, and I was trying to wingman when I had no real idea how to do that. She kept trailing off and it fell on me to keep the conversation going. At one point, she decided to get up to go to the bathroom so he could watch her ass as she walked away (or so she told me later).

Which meant she was leaving me, a tiny little thing, alone with a strange, much bigger than me man. It took him about three seconds to out of fucking nowhere scoop me into his lap and plant a kiss on me. A very g-rated kiss, but still, fucker actually kissed me. I was stunned. What the ever living crap was happening? Was this normal? Was this just... what talking to dudes in bars was like? Had I missed this in our cultural narrative? He was grinning, looking pleased with himself even though I'm sure I looked absolutely horrified. It didn't take me long to get out of his lap. He grabbed my elbow, not hard, but held it.

"Come on," he said, that shit eating grin still in place, "relax. Have a seat."

"I already did, that was the problem," and with that I bolted, seeing my two friends frozen to the spot in shock and awe at leaving me alone for thirty seconds to come back to find me in a random dude's lap.

"Ihateyoubothsomuchletsgonowplease." Eugene left our table, going back to his friends, and like a startled cat that had just fallen in the pool my friends coaxed me back to our table and pitcher. Eventually, I calmed down and we went back to our game, and that was when he came back. I froze, terrified. There was no way he couldn't tell I was scared, and no way he could think I was interested, but he came back anyways. Not only did he not seek my consent to touch me in the first place, he was now ignoring a blatant "NO". My friend, the birthday girl, stood in his way and announced we were leaving. He tried to convince us to stay but we peddled a few feeble lies about having to be up in the morning. Things dissolved into idle chit chat as they often do, and out of no where he asked my (very drunk) friend if she liked puzzles as he pulled a metal ring puzzle out of his pocket.

When she took the half step forward, he was past her and on the other side of me. Did I mention I was terrified? Because I was terrified. There was no attempt to hide the fact he freaked me out. He was touching me the second he was past my friend, and I froze. In hindsight, this was probably why he was targeting me. I was naive and awkward and not nearly self-assured enough to do something like tell him to take a hike. He figured it would be easy enough to get past my "no". My friend set the puzzle down.

"We're leaving," she said, unlike past me more than willing to make a scene. She slammed the puzzle down on the table and grabbed my arm. He had the other. For a horrifying moment, I thought this was going to become tug-of-war with me as the rope, but when I stepped towards my friend, he let go.

I was down the stairs in seconds, and confused, glanced to see where my friend was. She had paused to look at him and his friends and say "Yeah, NOT going to happen" before sauntering down after me. She lived across the street from me, and spent the cab ride home giving me tips and advice on how to deal with guys like him. "Girls in bathrooms are always really nice. Just ask someone to tell him you're sick and they're taking you home. Girls in the bathroom will always help," she said soothingly.

When we got home we pulled out a bottle of wine and sat in her yard. "Are you okay?"

The answer was "Not even a little". I was scared, traumatized, and shaken. I felt violated. I had never had anything like that happen to me before. He kept pushing, even after I said no, and not pushing as in he kept talking to me, but he kept touching me. To this day, I am leery of strange men in bars, and it took years before I would feel safe in one without at least one guy in our group (I have never had a guy at the bar approach me when I was in a mixed group).

When I was assaulted on the bus back in the fall, I knew what rape and assault actually looked like. I had people around me who were willing to call it what it was--assault--before I was. Back then? I was young, I was naive, so were those around me. No one called it assault when I told the story (which I did, often for laughs because it sounds so over the top) it was met with "Creeps, amIrite?" instead of "A-are you okay?" No one bat an eye at it, so why should I? But it nagged at me, for years.

Reading "Above the Game" made my skin crawl, because it put me back into that pool hall, into that creep's lap, and made me relive those moments. It made me relive the discomfort, it made me realize that I've been assaulted twice, not just once, and has left me feeling sick and depressed. Consent matters, and declaring yourself "above the game" is like declaring yourself "above the law". You just aren't, and thinking you are is dangerous.

Survivor's panic

Somewhere around 4 months ago I was sexually assaulted on a bus. I've talked about it a little bit in previous posts, but today I feel the need to talk about it in more depth.

I will warn that this post is very lightly edited and written very much from the moment, and consider the above a trigger warning.

So, the short story is that one lovely Fall afternoon I was catching a rush hour bus home when some creep trapped me in a corner, pressed up against my side, and rubbed his junk for a good ten minutes until it was his stop. I tried to take up less space, and when that didn't work elbow him off. His response was to glower and puff himself up.

I tried to gaslight myself the second I was off the bus. Maybe he just had super itchy balls? I mean, he was a creep either way, but you know, people on buses right?! I promptly realized what I was  doing, and pointed out that if I felt this rattled  and violated it wasn't "nothing". Some people have an angel and devil. I have an optimist who insists on seeing the good in everyone and a someone who is brutally pragmatic. The optimist wins more than you would think.

So I filed a police report and spent a few weeks being so anxious I could hardly eat. I am not an anxious person, but every day, getting on the bus to go to work and to go home (or any other running around I did) I was just a ball of rattled nerves. I was scared to take public transit alone. Something I had been doing (often late at night!) for five years. I had a few guys sit too close or ask questions like "SO YOU'RE ALONE WHERE ARE YOU GOIN BABY?" and I've had to deal with obnoxious close talkers and guys who called me a bitch when I told them no I didn't want to go out with them. None of that had traumatized me. This did. It got better, and I'm almost totally comfortable on the bus again.I mean, I still scan it every day just in case, and if I see a large bald man with a pencil thin chinstrap get panicky, but it's been (mostly) fine.

Until today.

Today I saw him again.

Not on the bus though. At work.

I work in a medical building, and there are a few coffee shops in it. One is right beside the kitchen I work in, which is right at the entrance. I was coming in for my shift and there he was. I did a double and triple take, being guided by my coworker  who I bussed in with that day. He looked puzzled as we rounded the corner into our own dining area. "You okay?"

I shook my head and told him what I had seen. He looked back but my attacker had vanished into the bowels of the building. Which is probably for the best. I wouldn't have wanted to file a second  police report.

At this point I was freaking the fuck out. I serve customers directly. I was suddenly in a situation where the man who had assaulted me on a bus could walk in and ask me to make him a sandwich. My hands were shaking, and my job involves using knives. I tried to talk myself down. I had told a few of my co-workers what was going on, if I suddenly bolted, they'd know what was up, right? I did not need to deal with him if he came in. There was also the nagging little voice in the back of my head. What if I was wrong and it WASN'T him and I was potentially about to bring a whole lot of awful onto some innocent random guy who's only crime was thinking a chin-strap was a good idea? They're really not, if anyone is thinking about it. Just, don't.

So I spent a few hours trying to calm the fuck down and get my prep done for the day. I managed the second half of that before I went to talk to my boss. I started by telling him I was freaking out and kind of needed some help getting my head back on straight. He looked intrigued if not wary. As did my kind-of-sort-of boss who was also in the office. I know many people would be shy and quiet about this sort of thing, but I've come to feel that if I can talk about something it's less scary, so I tend to be pretty open about... everything.

So I told them that I had seen the guy who assaulted me on a bus over the summer and was freaking out. For reasons I don't quite get, they asked for details of what happened, which I gave. I was a saint and didn't loose it on my not-actually boss when he started saying I should have gotten up and moved or screamed or or or. I just said "It's hard when they're twice your size and have you trapped in a corner" and he seemed so confident that had I just piped up, someone would have come to my rescue. I've been harassed in public before, and it's been loud and obvious, I've never had someone come to my rescue. I don't know why he was so certain I would have been saved. Maybe he needs to tell himself that so he doesn't hate the world? After I explained that no, I saw him IN THE BUILDING and I think at that point was on the verge of tears because why was my not just saying I was freaking out because I saw a guy who assaulted me on a bus not enough? Why did they need to know HOW? Did they have to decide if I was the "right" kind of victim (turns out I am. Yay?) before we moved on? I was told if I saw him to grab one of them and he'd be promptly banned, and my boss agreed to stick me in back for the day while he handled my station because I just couldn't stomach being on the service side that day.

So I have spent almost an entire day in a rattled, panicky state, simply because I saw the fucker. I imagine it will take a few weeks before I'm back to being almost totally okay with taking the bus again, and now I get to look around anxiously for 8 hours a day, too. What really struck me however is, my story, which isn't really that dramatic, has left me rattled and traumatized. Facing the victim blaming. People trying to push on me that I could/should have done something differently, because these are things that are stoppable if you follow the rules for their own peace of mind. A well meaning but incredibly condescending "Don't worry. We'll protect you from the big scary man" were enough to make me want to hide in dry storage and cry for a bit. I didn't because I'm stubborn like that, but damned if I didn't want to. It was so frustrating and just added to the helplessness I was already feeling. In all of this there was one thought that struck me- how much it must suck for so many other people who've lived through truly horrific things. Yes, what I went through is terrible and I shouldn't try to brush my own shit under the table because other people have it worse. I know that is the jerk-brain talking, but sometimes "It could be so much worse" is comforting in its own horrific way.

I don't have a clean way to tie this all together. I just wanted to share my sudden and horrific perspective of "Oh god if this is anything like what rape survivors deal with I need to get right the fuck to work on that mind control device so people will stop with the victim blaming and the "BUT HE SEEMED SO NICE AND YOU DRANK SO YOU'RE A DIRTY WHORE" bull shit."

So, as always, I'd like to hear your insights/thoughts in the comments, but I WILL be moderating them more closely than usual. If you slip into victim blaming, or rape apologisim, or anything of that ilk, depending on the severity you might get a single warning. If it's bad, you'll just get banned and the comment deleted. 50 Shades (and less heavy topics) on Thursday.

Also a quick note: I'll be tagging more "personal" posts with "Erika's diaries" for future searching ease.