Comic Review: S.H.O.O.T. First #1

By Comix

Oh, it’s another one of these. It’s that comic that you’ve read a million times, the one with the group of secretly funded ghost hunters who travel the globe stomping out monsters. We saw it in BPRD, we saw it in Atomic Robo, and in Hoax Hunters, The Intrepids, Justice League Dark, the list goes on and on. So why am I even bothering to stuff down another review about a group of diverse people banding together to stop evil in its tracks via magic and laser guns?

Because S.H.O.O.T. First has something that none of the other comics have, or, lack thereof. They lack faith in what they see. Standing for Secular Humanist Occult Obliteration Taskforce, S.H.O.O.T. has the unique problem of just plain not believing what they are seeing, even as they are shooting a djinn in the face or talking to angels, giving this comic a unique twist on a classic team story.

The comic starts out with terrorist attack in Iran. Originally thought to be a car bomb, it’s soon revealed that a couple of djinns have got loose from their world and decided to wreak havoc on a mosque. Enter S.H.O.O.T., a team of sass-talking Americans and Brits who come down to kick-ass and get names, all while blaming the appearance of the djinn as nothing but dimension hopping assholes. Weird, right? As things get a little tight in the prayer room, a man who had recently lost his faith saves the team by the skin of his teeth before blacking out. Waking up later in an underground facility in Dubai, the team explains to the man (and us) who they are and what they do. I don’t want to ruin it for you about how they work, but this kind of thing goes all the way to the Pope! Tossing in political intrigue and a war to end all wars, S.H.O.O.T. will have you questioning everything you’ve been taught about religion.

All in all, S.H.O.O.T. First is a very good read. The writing is tight and not one to focus on pointless narratives or dead-end plot tools, a true definition of Chekov’s gun. It’s interesting to see the comic attempt to re-analyze our beliefs and whilst some parts, like the guns firing on anger and doubt, is a bit schlocky, it doesn’t overstep the boundaries of good taste. It never insults the reader, just presents things differently. My only real problem would be the characters’ originality which is to say, there is none. There’s a tough, black woman, a snarky, British guy, a short-skirted, white girl; they’re nothing you haven’t seen before. That’s not to say they might not evolve past their roles, but it’s hard to see it at this point.

The writer, Justin Aclin, is not exactly new to the scene, but it seems like the only credit I can find is some Star Wars comics and something called Hero House. Also, blogging. Despite the limited experience, if S.H.O.O.T. First is any indication of what he’s capable of, I’d be interested to see more. Nicolas Selma, his artist is, well, an artist. He’s good at what he does and is very capable at illustrating Aclin’s words, but it’s not much to write about, which is pretty good since I’m a huge stickler for art. I definitely suggest picking S.H.O.O.T. First up; it starts up solid and continues all the way to the end, leaving the reader excited for the next issue.

S.H.O.O.T. First drops Oct. 16 from Dark Horse at your friendly, neighborhood comic shops!

The Rules of Film

By Guest Contributor Nathan Sturm

Editor’s note: can we improve the state of modern cinema with a few, handy, easy-to-follow rules? Our guest writer Nathan thinks that you can, and I’d bet my last banknote that a lot of Brutal As Hell readers will agree on a few of these. Check them out here…

1) Do not treat viewers as if they were stupid.

2) Never include a flashback to an earlier scene (unless it’s to show the protagonist focusing on some detail he hadn’t noticed before and that now means something different in light of new information).

3) Do not emphasize details with dramatic close-ups followed by someone’s face as they offer obvious, redundant commentary on what they (and we) just clearly saw.

4) Do not pound into the skull of viewers how they are supposed to morally judge a character by having that character do something really obviously good or bad that has no bearing on the plot and doesn’t fit with their personality, especially if their goodness or badness is already pretty clear.

5) Do not make movies that are really dumb in the belief that the movie-going public is composed entirely of morons who will only pay money to see dumb things. Many smart movies have, in fact, been profitable.

6) Do not go to excessive lengths to create implausible situations whereby the villain dies without the hero having to actually kill him.

7) Do not humiliate actors without good reason.

8 ) Do not attempt to use rectal trauma as a source of laughs.

9) Avoid casting actors unfortunate enough to be weasely-looking in minor parts as weasely characters who are devoid of redeeming characteristics.

10) Avoid casting actresses who seem attractive but vacuous in minor parts where their only function is to show lots of skin.

11) Do not create female characters who are indistinguishable from male characters except in appearance. (This can be waived for “authority figure / professional” type roles of middling plot importance, e.g. the hero’s boss, colleague, or doctor.)

12) Do not create female characters whose only function is to act as the sole representative of femininity in an otherwise all-male cast populating a world of testosterone (unless this is one of the major points of the story and can be articulated in some sort of meaningful and intelligent way).

13) If a female character is performing a traditionally-male role, do not draw excessive attention to the fact that “Oh my god, she is female, and yet, is performing a traditionally male role (while being a woman)!”

14) Avoid situations where the only function of the sole female character is to act as a prize coveted by rival male characters.

15) Do not assume that any and all villainous people of color are secretly being controlled by evil Caucasian masterminds.

16) Do not portray all American Southerners as physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to Orcs.

17) Do not create characters whose sole purpose is to say something politically incorrect, sentimentally immoral, or otherwise unpleasant, and then have something bad happen to them, all with little or no effect on the actual plot.

18) Never include an excessively sunny morning scene in which someone is cooking breakfast and everyone in the family sits down at the table to eat and is feeling chipper on their way to school or work, as this may be the single least-realistic of all Hollywood inventions.

19) Do not expect viewers to remember who a character is if the character in question never received a formal introduction and has no major distinguishing characteristics.

20) Never end with a statue being built of the protagonist (unless it’s a historical film and such a statue was actually built in real life).

21) Use less turquoise light.

22) Do not fill every second of runtime with music. Dialogue in quiet scenes is more likely to be ignored and used to signal bathroom-break time if the music is already telling us how we’re supposed to feel here. (This can be waived for movies with very minimal dialogue and an “operatic” feel, particularly if the musical score is exceedingly good.)

23) Avoid killing off characters just for the sake of having someone die right before or during the climax. This does not apply to climaxes where the whole point seems to be to kill off most or all of the characters.

24) Do not remake older films without valid artistic reason.

25) Do not make a movie to begin with if it’s going to end up with a title that includes a colon followed by a year.

26) Do not portray teenagers as being enamoured of things that were trendy ten years ago and then include some condescending plot twist whereby they stop “rebelling” and go back to being their “true self”, i.e. exactly the way they were as little kids (only now with an income), to the relief of their long-suffering upper-middle-class parents.

27) Create a sense of impact and force when something strikes something else, even if the computer-generated pixels can’t feel anything.

28) Do not have a character turn out to be a traitor at the end for the sole purpose of having a character turn out to be a traitor at the end, especially if this does not actually serve the plot in any meaningful way and if the character in question was likeable.

29) Do not create villains who are identical to the Nazis despite having arisen under different social, political, cultural, and economic circumstances.

30) Do not create heroes who are suddenly handed the opportunity to, without having to expend much effort, become really awesome and fulfil all their dreams, etc. for no identifiable reason other than to make viewers feel good about themselves for two hours before returning to their shitty jobs and underwhelming private lives, etc.

31) Do not further sully the reputation of the horror genre with the assumption that all horror is automatically schlock and does not require standards of quality.

32) Do not make a horror film just because you heard on the Internet that it’s the quickest way to “break into” the industry (i.e. by making a profit on a minimal budget) if you have no understanding of, or appreciation for, horror.

33) Do not make a horror film just because you heard on the Internet that “horror films these days are insufficiently extreme and overly predictable” and you want to show other Internet-people that you are more extreme and/or more ironically clever than they are.

34) Put the viewer in the characters’ shoes, and then scare the characters. Avoid trying to scare the viewer directly while bypassing the characters, unless you are really good at creating an unnerving atmosphere.

35) Avoid including socio-political-type messages that amount to beating a dead horse. If the reason you’re including a message is because you heard the same message in four or five other recent films, don’t include it (unless the message was garbled in each of those cases and you actually have something new and intelligent to offer on the subject).

36) Avoid populist themes in movies about things that are only of any concern to the social elite to begin with, such as country clubs.

37) Do not steal someone else’s idea and then water it down for mainstream consumption.

38) Never greenlight a project on the sole basis of a cool-sounding premise and a decent, special-effects-laden climax if the main body of the film is going to consist of nothing but characters walking around, opening and closing doors, making cryptic and/or redundant statements to one another, and occasionally having arguments over whose lover’s desk has the biggest donut-box resting on it until the actually interesting stuff happens at the end.

39) Never, ever, never under any circumstances include a scene justifying the use of torture in stopping terrorists.

40) Do not make “inspiring stories”. Please. Please.

Book Review: The Jack in the Green by Frazer Lee

By Keri O’Shea

Threaded through what little we understand of early British pagan beliefs – and one of the reasons they continue to hold such fascination is that so much about them has been obscured by time – is the central idea that Nature is cyclical, with birth and death not only following one another, but necessary to one another. Although it is an idea which at least partly formed the basis of the rather anaemic Wicca movement in the twentieth century, perhaps its most well-known representation in horror cinema is still via the greatest ever British horror movie, The Wicker Man, with its OST song ‘The Maypole Song’ providing a succinct summation of the belief. In referencing a British folk song, ‘The Cauld Lad of Hylton’ in his prologue – one of a wealth of songs which surely influenced Paul Giovanni in his own work – author Frazer Lee seems from the outset to be calling to that set of beliefs, and to their representations. This was not the last time that The Wicker Man crept into my head as I read his latest book. However, as a horror fan himself, Frazer doesn’t just stick with psychological horror in his latest novel, The Jack in the Green. The opening of this book packs a visceral, horribly sensual punch which makes it clear that body, mind and soul are always at risk here.

Tom McCrae is a man in his mid-thirties who, outwardly at least, has signed up to the sanctioned routine of wife-home-career. However, Tom is plagued by nightmares about the murder of his parents, who were killed when he was just six years old, and these dreams continue to have a terrifying, destabilising effect on his waking life. Now living in California with his wife Julia, living day to day and seemingly deeply dissatisfied with his lot, he takes an assignment which requires him to travel to Scotland to secure important real estate for the expansion of his company’s biofuel business. Upon arrival, his nightmares begin to escalate, and worse – they now seem to have become invested with an unpleasant sense of foreboding. Predestiny? Tom certainly seems to be entering an unpleasant and inescapable chain of events which call to an existence of his beyond him.

There has been, of late, something of a pattern in Frazer Lee’s fiction: as in his recent novella The Lucifer Glass, here we have in our central character (though not our narrator) Tom McCrae another contested modern career man, one who only has the appearance of stability and contentment. For Tom, it only takes one shift in circumstances to propel him towards confronting his true self. These divided, often guilt-ridden men whose devils on their shoulders are only too ready to begin to speak louder allow for a pleasing ambiguity to develop in the narrative, and also for flawed, yet believable conduct from main characters towards others. There’s a constant note of cynicism here, too: Tom McCrae often lapses into sneering dissatisfaction with the system he has found himself part of, his internal monologue lashing out at everything which is wrong with the world even as he is carried along with it. This believable grounding permits the fantastical which creeps in to feel more weighty – as if all of these horrific things are happening to someone that for the most part you can easily believe in.

And the horror which unfolds brings with it some very neat, well-wrought ideas. One thing which Lee does very well is write about dreams, creating convincing nightmares that are integral to the plot, but not simply stopping there; the other side of the coin is to see what effect these have upon his characters as they try to make sense of the nonsensical, and try to disbelieve in what they have just experienced. As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult for his characters – and for us – to make this distinction. This creates some very engaging and effective horror sequences, described in vivid detail (though at times the number of similes used in the text feels excessive). The location of the story in remote Scotland is also important to the success of these horror sequences, as Lee renders some deeply evocative descriptions of the woodland which surrounds the village of Douglass, making it fundamental to the dreams themselves, but also using it to again remind us that Nature is as pitiless as it is picturesque. Bad dreams, childhood trauma, darkest woods…The Jack in the Green knowingly shuffles the horror archetypes like a pack of cards.

I have alluded to the novel’s outward connections to The Wicker Man: certainly, the barest description of the plot – a professional man called from suburbia to an isolated Scottish community which seems to retain odd, atavistic beliefs – makes the comparison inevitable. There are other common points, too, but as the story moves along, Lee’s evident awareness of these sends things into a much different direction. In many ways this is the sequel to The Wicker Man that I wish existed instead of the abysmal Wicker Tree; The Jack in the Green takes recognisable elements, sure, but allows them to extend into the supernatural in a way which The Wicker Man never does. It takes the ‘old gods’ of Summerisle and makes them real – and terrifying – in Douglass. Not only this, but there are also graphic, bloody scenes in this novel more akin to Hellraiser than The Wicker Man. By the time we reach the finale of this book, it is a very different beast to the one I expected and which, if you are yet convinced that this is too close to The Wicker Man for comfort, you will expect either.

In order to create greater complexity, though, Lee introduces several supporting characters, one of whom in particular I felt became ever more rootless as his presence in the narrative increased. I wanted to know a lot more about him – but he was moved aside for an end sequence about-face which felt slightly frustrating. There are also other characters whom I questioned at first, but they – to a greater or lesser extent – prove their worth, eventually tying into the plot well. This is not to say that Lee’s determination to close his tale in the same dark way it begins doesn’t pay off, but it means at least one compromise is made in order to do so.

However, it is a small detail considering the many things to recommend this novel. Skillfully blending quintessential British horror with vivid interludes of bodily trauma and mental anguish, The Jack in the Green is as ambitious as it is enthusiastic. In reading this book you will vacillate between different states: terrified child, restless sleeper and horrified bystander. There is plenty here to call to each.

The Jack in the Green is available from 1st October 2013 from Samhain Publishing.

DVD Review: I Spit On Your Grave 2

By Tristan Bishop

I remember being confounded when I heard the news – I Spit On Your Grave 2 was on the way. A remake of a controversial classic is one thing, but a sequel to one which didn’t have any sequels originally? And the press release referring to it as a ‘franchise’ set more than a few teeth on edge. Granted, the 2010 I Spit On Your Grave remake is generally regarded as one of the less awful of the current batch of re-imaginings of horror classics, but this seemed perhaps a step too far.

Then came the infamous quote. A British print magazine which shall remain nameless gave up the following as a sound bite – “The best horror sequel ever made”. Right there in black and white. Let’s forget such disappointing fare as Bride Of Frankenstein, or Dr Phibes Rises Again, or Halloween 3 – this is the real deal, folks! The benchmark has been set!

But all irritating sarcasm aside, my interest was suitably piqued. After all, whoever gave that quote must have been impressed (or possibly caught short in a moment of emotional weakness), so I was curious to see what director Steven R Monroe (who also directed the original as well as various SyFy channel master works like the Katharine Isabelle-starrer Ogre) had to offer.

Our main protagonist is Katie (Jemma Dallender), who is an aspiring model. When one agency tells her that she needs better portfolio pictures, she is given a number for a free photography service. At the studio she is greeted by Ivan, the photographer, played by that Joe Absolom out of EastEnders, as well as his brothers, the friendly but creepy Georgy, and druggie scum bag Nikolai. They take her photos, but when it is suggested she ‘shows a little more skin’ she cottons onto the scam and leaves. Later Georgy appears at her apartment to give her the pictures, and is making a very good job of looking like a creepy stalker. She thanks him and asks him to leave. However, soon afterwards he turns up in her apartment in the middle of the night, binds and rapes her. Her friend arrives and tries to stop him, but is knifed and killed. Georgy calls his brothers to come and sort out the mess, and Katie is force-fed ketamine and wakes in a dirty basement. She manages to escape (after some abuse and a second, mostly off-screen rape from Nikolai, which Georgy stops), and soon discovers she has been transported from New York to Bulgaria without her knowledge whilst drugged, with no clothes, save a short nightie, no money and no idea of how to get home.

This being a sequel to I Spit On Your Grave, then I won’t be offering up any massive spoilers when I reveal that she doesn’t go straight to the US Embassy and get on a plane home – she instead wreaks violent vengeance on her abusers. There are a couple of plot twists on the way there, albeit nothing too taxing or surprising. We’ve probably all seen a rape/revenge film before and they all follow the same pattern. So is there any reason to watch this? Well, that entirely depends on your reason for wanting to see the film.

For the casual film-goer, probably not. Whilst the film-makers are competent enough, the script is fairly dire, with Katie delivering lines earlier on such as ‘I know how to catch me some vermin’ (she grew up in the country you see – this is the sole bit of characterisation our central character is afforded), and her later leaving a Bible open, causing a priest’s eye to fall on the ‘Vengeance is mine’ verse. This is not a film which deals in subtlety – and in fact that would be excusable for a rough and ready exploitation film, but the second major weak point is, unfortunately, the lead actress. Whilst entirely convincing as a model, Dallender struggles to deliver the pitch black sarcasm as she eviscerates her attackers (although to be fair she isn’t given much to work with), and as for the scenes where she manhandles the rapists, her tiny frame seems entirely incapable of such action, and we are left with a growing sense of disbelief in what was already a fairly shaky concept.

To give them their due, though, the people who made this knew who they were making this for – the indiscriminate gore hounds amongst us – those who can happily ignore any minor shortcomings like acting or knowing how to move a camera at the right time if they are given a healthy dose of gore and/or sleaze. I occasionally count myself among these people if I’m in a particularly twisted mood, in fact. So does it deliver in the requisite brutality?

Yeah it does. And then some. The version under review has been, rather astoundingly, shorn of a massive six minutes at the behest of the BBFC (although this was by prior consultation, so the film has not technically been cut by them). I believe it differs somewhat to the unfinished ‘special festival cut’ shown at Frightfest, but as I did not attend, and have not yet seen the unrated version, and cannot find any information whatsoever as to exactly what was missing, I am left to assume this was all cut from the first half of the film, and the rape and humiliation of Katie – In fact, given the excesses of the original’s near three quarter hour rape sequences, I was somewhat surprised (and somewhat relieved, truth be told) that the sexual assaults take up only a couple of minutes of screen-time, and one takes place off-screen entirely (at least in this version). It’s still plenty grim though, just not in the league that I was expecting giving the series’ pedigree. Any such fears that the revenge parts in the second half of the film might have been subject to censorial interference are dashed however, as our angel of death slices, electrocutes, beats and subjects her former attackers to even worse tortures – one scene in particular left me with my jaw resting in my lap, and the gruesome details are just the sort that dedicated gore freaks will eat up.

So can I recommend it as the best horror sequel ever made? Or even as a worthwhile film to the average viewer? Not remotely, but the UK cut serves up the expected splattery revenge, and for those among us with a taste for the twisted, that will probably be enough to warrant a viewing.

I Spit On Your Grave 2 will be released to DVD on October 8th 2013.

DVD Review: Thanatomorphose (2012)

By Keri O’Shea

When a film’s press release name-checks Cronenberg and Buttgereit, it has immediately placed itself in a risky position; any movie mentioned in the same breath as these bastions of body horror has a hell of a way to go to prove itself, and you often can’t help thinking it’d be better if a film came in quieter, kept below the parapet and let its qualities speak for themselves. It would certainly have been better in this instance, as unfortunately Thanatomorphose, despite its cool title and interesting-on-paper premise, is simply not up to the challenge. Body horror, yes, but with severe limitations.

After a night of bruise-inducing sex which is refracted through a trippy, psychedelic array of filters and colours, we meet our nameless female protagonist (played by Kayden Rose) and find her fairly nonchalant about her injuries. She seems fairly unresponsive to most things, actually – her activity partner’s attitude towards her, her shitty landlord, her friend who seems desperate to become a slightly more considerate friend-with-benefits…that is, until her injuries, rather than healing, begin to mysteriously worsen. Soon her fingernails are dropping off, her hair is shedding – in fact, she seems to be decomposing. At first, she’s terrified – but soon enough she seems to being finding it all quite liberating. The worse she looks, the better she feels, and the more able she seems to feel to put things in her life order once and for all.

See, all of that sounds original and challenging, but the challenging nature of making that storyline effective is not borne out by the way it’s handled on screen. The vivid, promising opening sequence gives way to a long series of domestic scenes which, despite the sheer amount of nudity involved (more anon), I can only describe as turgid. I tried very hard, I looked very hard, but I found myself switching off. I would say that the first twenty minutes of this movie are make-or-break time; had characterisation occurred at this point, and had I been able to feel anything at all for the lead, then what eventually happens to her might have had the sort of impact you imagine is possible when you look at the blurb. Of course, it could be that the way in which our protagonist is kept remote from the audience is actually deliberate and intended to make a point about her relationship to herself, but that doesn’t come across successfully. I never felt sure whether the flatness of the role was aim or accident, but I was definitely repelled by the barrage of ‘girl walks around apartment’ sequences and didn’t feel that these moved the film along in any expedient way. Any film which takes place in such a limited space with a small cast really needs to go some in order to achieve what it sets out to do. Editing takes place through these scenes, sure, but the jumps forward keep us within the same mundane scenes. The pace soon drops away to nothing.

And yeah, the fact that Kayden Rose is naked or at least has her ass out in most of these scenes could, I am sure, also be intentional in the sense that the director and writer, Éric Falardeau, wants to make the point that her character is only ever seen as a sex object, or something. Except I can’t quite believe that. I’m very far from being sensitive to T&A in cinema, believe me, but the way it occurs here felt skeezy and unpleasant in ways which are quite hard to quantify, though I’ll try.

It’s not that the nudity is simply plentiful; it’s not that it so frequently seems like it has been crowbarred into proceedings with little or no justification; it’s not even that it is badly shot and edited. It’s all of those things, only lethally combined with the non-entity status of the character – the only character we really get, despite a handful of small roles. If any filmmaker is trying to make a point that this woman – or even women in general – have to literally go to pieces in order to reclaim their bodies, then this grand point feels redundant when it feels like the filmmaker is part and parcel of the problem which sees women in that way in the first place. This girl is rendered down into a collage of butt shots and passive utterances; if the intention was to present the audience with more than that, then it’s not there.

And yet, this is a film which seems to aim high. The psychedelic asides, though few and far between, and the fact that the film is broken into three named chapters, seem to be giving a nod to filmmakers like Noé and Von Trier, rather than more conventional horror fare. Nothing wrong with being ambitious, of course, but perhaps getting the basics right first would be best. There are some good things going on here; the make up SFX as Rose’s character begins to putrefy are genuinely rather good considering they’ll have been done on a tight budget, and the idea itself is good, which perhaps means that more ideas may spring from the same source in future. However, in Thanatomorphose the centre cannot hold, and the finished product itself goes from lividity to rigor mortis to decomposition.

Thanatomorphose will be released in the UK on DVD and iTunes by Monster Pictures on 25th November 2013.

DVD Review: Black Rock (2012)

By Keri O’Shea

Camping is for idiots.

No, really, come on. Level with me here. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up (or indeed how many mod cons you actually need to take along for the ‘back-to-nature’ experience to be at all palatable). Fact is, we invented permanent dwellings millennia ago because living out in the elements sucks – and that’s even before we get to the oh-so special relationship between the horror genre and the whole deal. Of course, people being out of their comfort zones, trying to survive in unfamiliar terrain amongst unfamiliar folks, that’s always going to be ripe for a horror spin. But I maintain that part of the reason that canvas is so much part of the fabric of horror is because it allows filmmakers and audiences alike to emit a primal scream. We get to revel in the schadenfreude of seeing unhappy campers having an even more miserable time than they would have had anyway.

But I digress.

Black Rock takes this familiar idea as its bedrock, offering up what in many ways is the standard ‘don’t go into the woods’ theme. However, despite the familiar premise, it shows itself capable of surpassing the more tried-and-tested elements in several places and in several ways. To achieve this takes a due amount of bravery and it’s a film which takes a fair few risks – albeit making a few mistakes – along the way.

Early thirtysomethings Sarah (Kate ‘Lois Lane’ Bosworth), Abby (also director Kate Aselton) and Lou (Lake Bell) are heading to their old childhood camping haunt, the island of Black Rock, where as ten year olds they buried time capsules. Sarah, in a nostalgic frame of mind, wants to find them, so she ropes in her two old friends to help her, hoping to get them to overcome a past estrangement in the process. Still, old bitterness dies hard, and things are off to a shaky start when they encounter some other people who are also visiting the island that weekend. The fact that one of these people is another old childhood acquaintance, Henry (Will Bouvier) and his two friends over on a hunting trip, though, is a welcome distraction and momentarily defuses the tension between the girls. They camp out together, the booze flows, and – in just a second – things turn very sour indeed…

All sounds oddly familiar, doesn’t it? However, one positive Black Rock can boast is that, even when I could more or less predict where and how things were going to go, I was never permitted to simply settle into a mode and just stop paying attention. The film prevents this from happening, never quite leaving a clear enough trail of horror tropes for you to feel you can follow the path and see the whole way ahead too. For instance, by five minutes in, I felt confident I was going to dislike the female characters here, and that they were – in some way or another – going to wind up being unbelievable superwomen (I’d already seen the film described as a ‘feminist Deliverance’, mind you, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that I was going to enjoy this). By ten minutes in, yep, I hated the female characters; yet, the film made me reconsider my feelings on them straight after that, via the risky strategy of a red herring moment followed by an understated carpe diem which worked best when counterbalanced by the way the plot unfolded. That’s one thing the film does very well – it allows itself moments which are not neat, and this enables a few moments of uncertainty to creep in, keeping the viewer (or at least this viewer) engaged. It has a good handle on naturalistic dialogue, too, often warm and believable as well as authentically overlapping and uneven.

Black Rock is a beautifully-shot, bright, colourful film too, and that always goes in a movie’s favour when the blue filter treatment seems to be added in post-production as a matter of course. With their red hair, Lou and Abby in particular seem to mirror the autumnal surroundings in an aesthetically-pleasing way at surprising times, adding an odd picturesque note to all of the chaos which is otherwise unfolding. The acting is generally of a good standard – Aselton plays a blinder as the complex Abby – and it usually steers clear of the feared superwoman motif; there’s more going on, although the women in the film are given far, far more to play with than the men; as part of its pleasing unpredictability the plot ejects key characters whom you might expect to stick around, although this leaves at least one player who is let down by his stock characterisation, and never really being permitted to surpass it. That is a shame, as it’s moments relating to ‘the threat’ that can tend to feel ham-fisted, undermining the best moments in the movie.

And here we come to a major sticking point: Black Rock’s strong sense of ‘we’re not just making another cookie-cutter ordeal movie’ enables it accomplish a good deal, but it also adds a gloss of self-awareness to proceedings here. Because it doesn’t want to be so many things, this means it invariably is many other things; the grand notion of gender role reversal in horror like this begins to follow its own clichés when it becomes most overt, and the film is far stronger it its more subtle moments. Still, Black Rock is well-made and weaves a watchable story out of, frankly, unpromising elements. Where it takes risks it is at its best, and in this it’s definitely to be admired.

Writer’s note: beware of the trailer, which gives away the entirety of the film (sigh):

Comic Review: Is This the Real Life? Or is This Just Fantasy? Reality Check #1

By Comix

One thing I learned from being around the comic circuit is that no one is more expandable (and replaceable) than the creative talent. Writers, each as unique as a snowflake, are a dime a dozen; artists, limited to the writers’ words, are even more so. Unless you’re one of the lucky few that can either spin a unique take on already established characters or are allowed, by some sort of miracle and voracious drive, to create your own story, you are nothing more than a name swimming in a pool of talent and struggling to stay afloat. In Reality Check, we see a writer fighting to get to the top of his profession, at the mercy of his producers, developers, and personal demons. A hard, yet sometimes funny look at the uncompromising profession of a professional comic creator, the comic slowly delves into a bizarre story of what’s real and what’s not.

The main character, Martin, is your average, shlubby comic creator. Thick around the belly and skinny around the ankles, the comic opens up with him reflecting back upon his life as a writer in LA. His character, Hour Man, is quietly making the rounds in comic stores and between getting slapped by hot girls and hustled by his managers, he manages to eke out a decent living for himself. The readers begin to get a taste of where Martin has come from – his tragic origins, if you will – as he makes his way around town. Little does he know, though, that life is about to take a turn for the better and then quickly a turn for the worse. After pitching his character around town, he soon gets picked up by an interested party, but a computer crash destroys all his files of any upcoming work. Already weeks behind schedule and now with no work to show for it, he is suddenly visited by an unexpected guest. Someone he thought didn’t exist. Someone, who, when he last checked, was a product of his imagination – and his imagination is pissed.

Reality Check is one of those comics that could either be amazing or it could totally blow: the set-up is interesting and it keeps you guessing at the next issue, but the story plays off as a little gimmicky. I mean, a creator runs into a living version of his own creation; where’s it going to go? Is it going to be space travel? Imagination on the loose? A costumed crazy?! Who knows! It could be gory or completely benign, funny or serious. I don’t know much about the author, Glen Brunswick, either, so I can’t even guess where it might go based on his other works. I do, however, like the story of Martin himself, how the comic digs deep into his past as an influence for his work. It’s a pretty accurate representation of how the comic business works, especially in reference to a multi-media franchise, and it sheds an interesting light on how your favorite stories go from the board to the horde. The art by Viktor Bogdanovic leaves something to be desired though. I’m not sure if it’s the terrible inking or off-putting art, but the images are a bit wonky looking, with limbs and eyes splayed all over the place. The detail is nice, but the sequential part gets pretty rusty. Either way, I would label Reality Check as a ‘purchase with caution’.

Reality Check #1 will hit the stands on September 4th 2013.

FrightFest 2013: Round-Up, Part 1

By Stephanie Scaife

It’s that time of the year again: FrightFest is back and it is bigger than ever, screening a massive line-up of 51 films across 3 screens at London’s iconic Empire Leicester Square cinema.

After sadly managing to miss the world première of The Dead 2: India, FrightFest 2013 began for me with everyone’s favourite killer doll in Curse of Chucky. Now, I’m honestly not a fan of the Child’s Play films, with the exception of Bride of Chucky, which let’s face it is awesome, and despite the appearance of my absolute favourite person in the world (John Waters) in Seed of Chucky it is a series that I’ve never been particularly excited by or interested in. Having said that, Curse of Chucky provided some pretty decent, silly entertainment and proved a popular choice with the audience who laughed and cheered throughout. Written and directed by the series creator Don Mancini, Curse of Chucky tonally has far more in common with the early instalments and plays it fairly straight throughout. We are introduced to Sarah (Chantal Quesnelle) and her paraplegic daughter Nica (Fiona Douriff) who unexpectedly receive a Chucky doll in the mail. After the mysterious death of Sarah, Nica’s sister Barb (Danielle Bisutti) shows up with her family to help settle affairs, which in actual fact means putting her sister in a care home and selling the family home. However, once Barb’s daughter takes a liking to the Chucky doll and the pair become inseparable, all hell breaks loose. I think that although there’s nothing particularly new going on here and it is a straight-to-video release there is still fun to be had, even if it lacks any genuine scares. Brad Douriff returns yet again to voice the little red-haired fella, giving it his all with some cracking one liners, and his daughter Fiona gives us a great heroine in the form of Nica. If you’re a fan of the franchise then you’ll definitely not be disappointed in this sixth instalment of the series (and make sure you stick around for a decent post credits sting), but for me it mostly just made me want to go home and watch Bride of Chucky again.

The opening evening came to a close with Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, which seems to have been around forever. Although it’s actually very good, its release now seems to be due to the recent and massive success of The Purge, with which it shares some similarities. This however isn’t exactly your typical home invasion thriller and I really enjoyed its mix of dark humour and grisly violence. There are some great twists (that I honestly didn’t see coming) and some truly inventive death scenes. After A Horrible Way to Die and now this Wingard is proving himself to be someone to watch in the world of horror. You can read Dustin’s review here.

Saturday started with The Dyatlov Pass Incident, which I had already seen and disliked so wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. You can read my review here. This was followed by the world première of Kit Ryan’s Dementamania, a British psycho-thriller that very much wanted to be Jacob’s Ladder but came across as a rather over-ambitious and jumbled mess. It centres around Edward (Sam Robertson) a bored office worker with emotional problems who one day gets stung by an unusual looking wasp that causes him to slowly unravel, physically and mentally. There are some laughs to be had as Ed imagines in violent bloody detail what he’d like to do to his annoying co-workers, as well as some great effects work and surreal imagery, but ultimately it’s all over the place and I would be pretty surprised if this is the final edit of the film before it secures any sort of release. Neither did the use of women (phwoar… lesbians!) and a little person (aren’t they just hilarious!) sit entirely comfortably with me. It’s a shame because regardless of my issues with the film, it was nice to see a British genre film attempt to do something so different and out there.

Vincenzo Natali’s Haunter proved to be an interesting little ghost story in the vein of Groundhog Day, when a teenage ghost is forced to live the last day of her life over and over. Abigail Breslin is fantastic as 15-year old Lisa and it’s great to see a young female character with smarts and moxy (not to mention great taste in music). There are also some lovely period touches and a few atmospheric moments, but ultimately it lost its way and provided an unsatisfactory happy ending that left me with more questions than the film answered. It’s a novel twist on the haunted house narrative to have the ghosts in the forefront, and the living providing the mystery and some of the scares, but ultimately it proved to be an altogether average and forgettable picture.

Next up was V/H/S/2 which I have to admit I wasn’t looking forward to at all. The love for the first film has always been a mystery to me as I don’t particularly enjoy portmanteau or found-footage films, so a combination of the two proved to be my kryptonite. The second outing is very much like the first; this time we’re given a couple of PIs who, whilst searching for a missing teenager come across a dodgy pile of videotapes. The first offering comes in the form of Adam Wingard’s (A Horrible Way to Die, You’re Next) disappointing Phase I Clinical Trials, where a man with a robotic eye starts to see dead people. The second segment from Edúardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale (The Blair Witch Project) is a fairly uninspiring and one-note zombie tale entitled A Ride in the Park. Thankfully, Gareth Evans (The Raid) and Timo Tjahjanto (Macabre) come along to save the day with Safe Haven, the longest and best segment of the film. To say too much would be to spoil the fun but you literally will not believe your eyes when you see what these guys have come up with. It’s absolutely mind-boggling and completely off the wall, well worth sitting through the rest of the film for. The Safe Haven of the title refers to a religious commune dogged by rumours of child abuse. The commune is led by a charismatic leader known only as Father, and a documentary film crew have seemingly just talked their way into the inner sanctum hitherto unseen by the uninitiated. Just moments after entering the commune all is not as it seems and when the shit hits the fan, it does not let up. Just when you think it can’t possibly get any weirder, you’re quickly proven wrong. This is jaw-dropping stuff and Gareth Evans is proving himself to be quite a filmmaker, something confirmed after the film when we were treated to a world exclusive sneak peak from The Raid 2 (and it looks fucking insane). The last segment of V/H/S/2 by Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun) entitled Slumber Party Alien Abduction is as noisy and insane as the title may suggest, but also as annoying. It was frankly the worst sort of found-footage; endless screaming, shaky camera, loud noises and not to mention incoherent once the action kicked in. I was in need of a cup of tea, some painkillers and a nice quiet sit down afterwards.

Lastly we had 100 Bloody Acres, a wonderfully dark and funny Australian take on psychobilly horror by sibling writer-directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes. It’s starts off fairly predictably as we meet Sophie (Anna McGahan) a sassy city girl who is on the road to a music festival with her straight-laced boyfriend James (Oliver Ackland) and their cocky Cockney friend Wes (Jamie Kristian). All fairly standard personalities when it comes to the genre, so it comes as no surprise when Reg, a creepy local businessman that produces fertilizer, picks them up after their car breaks down. You may feel like you’d trudging into familiar territory here, but the first indication of something different comes in the immediate bond that develops between Reg and Sophie, bizarrely over their shared love of country music. What 100 Bloody Acres does is take an overly-familiar genre and cleverly manages to both work within its confines whilst creating something entirely original, all the while carefully balancing the fine line of comedy horror, providing both in droves. Reg’s psychotic brother Lindsay (Angus Sampson) is perhaps the only weak link, one-note character present here. Overall though, 100 Bloody Acres is another addition to the impressive output of recent Aussie horror (The Loved Ones, Wolf Creek, The Horseman etc) and it is one of those films that is the reason horror fans are so resolute and defiant despite an ongoing and continuous output of rubbish – this film is an unexpected surprise, smart, funny, original and it absolutely doesn’t skimp on the gore!

Editor’s note: read the second part of Steph’s FrightFest 2013 report here.

FrightFest 2013 Review: Willow Creek (2013)

By Stephanie Scaife

You may be familiar with Bobcat Goldthwait through the likes of his pitch black comedies World’s Greatest Dad (2009) and God Bless America (2011), or as Zed in the Police Academy movies, so it may come as a surprise to find out that his newest picture as a writer and director is a found footage horror film. Now, let me just say straight up that you shouldn’t be put off by this fact and I’m saying this as someone who is vehemently anti-found footage. I struggle with even the most popular offerings this genre has provided and could easily live without The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield et al. So I was pretty surprised that I didn’t hate Willow Creek. In fact, it was actually pretty good.

Jim (Bryce Johnson), a Bigfoot enthusiast, and his sceptical girlfriend Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) are making a film of their attempt to retrace the steps of Patterson and Gimlin, who famously shot footage of Bigfoot in 1967 in Northern California. One of the common issues with found footage films is that the characters are often under-developed and it can be a struggle to have any empathy or understanding as to their motivations, but with Willow Creek we’re given a very likeable couple and the actors have great chemistry on screen. Their banter is part scripted, part improvised but entirely believable. The set-up is also given the care and attention that it deserves as they arrive in the titular town of Willow Creek and explore the various oddities the town has to offer (Bigfoot Museum, Bigfoot Information Centre, Bigfoot Museum, Bigfoot Burgers… you get the picture) whilst meeting its unusual inhabitants, most of whom are real people roped into being interviewed on camera and led to believe that Jim and Kelly are really amateur documentary filmmakers, not actors in a horror film. This adds a real authenticity and the fact that Goldthwait fully ingratiated himself with the Bigfoot community really shows in the humour and enthusiasm for the topic. This includes a segment featuring Tom Yamarone (known locally as the “Bigfoot Bob Dylan”) singing his song Roger & Bob (Rode Out That Day) along with a host of other colourful locals.

After a light-hearted and amusing first half, Jim and Kelly embark on the trail into the Trinity National Forest to get to the exact location of the Patterson-Gimlin film. This is when we get our first hint that all is not well for this pair, when they bump into an inhospitable redneck that warns them to turn around and head back the way they came. Failing to heed his words of advice they trek deep into the woods and pitch up camp for the night. This was where I thought the film was going to start to fall foul of the genre tropes and there would be a whole bunch of shaky-cam and screaming, but instead what we get is a very tense, single-shot scene of the couple in a tent that lasts for a staggering 19 minutes. You can tell that the actors haven’t entirely been filled in on the events that are about to unfold and their fear is often genuine, creating a palpable sense of unease.

Willow Creek isn’t perfect, and yes, the last ten minutes or so do delve slightly into the world of motion sickness and hysterics but Goldthwait pulls it off by making a film that is in equal parts funny and creepy. For once the continuity is solid and you’re never left wondering how the film ended up so well edited or why on earth someone is still filming (the most irksome aspect of the genre in my opinion). What you see on camera feels real and never unnatural or inexplicable. I won’t spoil what happens, but I would highly recommend checking out Willow Creek if you get the chance and I certainly hope it gets picked up and released. It’s a surprise that nobody has seriously tackled the Bigfoot mythology in a straight up horror film before; perhaps it seems on the surface to be too silly a concept, but Goldthwait was clearly the man for the job and I applaud him for it.

Comic Review: Itty Bitty Hellboy #1

By Comix

Hellboy has been through a hell of a lot of things. From monsters and ghosts to love and death, the red beast has taken on the best and the worst the world has thrown at him. With this month marking the 20th anniversary of his creation, a new take on Hellboy will be hitting shelves in a couple of weeks that will shove him up onto a whole new level of sick and twisted depravity. Something so evil, so wicked, that only the innocent will survive its coming: Itty Bitty Hellboy. That’s right! A big headed, big fisted, tiny built little devil shall assume the shape of the cigar-chomping monster and, with miniaturized versions of his BPRD pals, shall ride a blood tide of “Aww” and “So cute!” straight into your perverted hearts. Disgustingly adorable, this comic will certainly bring about the apocalypse.

Itty Bitty Hellboy is written in short, mini-comics that string along to make a bigger a story. It basically circles around “the bad kids” (Karl Kroenen, Rasputin, and Herman Von Klempt) as they attempt to take over the BPRD “good kids”’ new cardboard fortress, and what a fortress it is! A giant refrigerator box compared to their small dishwasher one, the greed drives Karl to desperate measures such as spying in the bushes on the rival team and even, wait for it, DEMANDING that they give up their box! The very idea! The comic is also peppered with cute little stories about the team trying to cure Johann of his cold after he keeps sneezing himself out his suit, or Roger’s inability to stay in his underwear.

A read for all ages, this work is an excellent way to get your kids into Hellboy without all the super seriousness of the current issues, as well as being a nice addition for the seasoned collector. It has a very silly Dennis the Menace vibe that would appeal to anyone who has grown up reading the Sunday funnies or perhaps is still reading them. The art is cute and simplistic, perfect for little hands, while the jokes run the gamut of eye-rolling cheesy to genuinely giggle-inducing. The guys behind the idea, Franco Aureliani and Art Baltazar, are old hands at kiddie homages, having earned themselves an Eisner for Tiny Titans, a fifty issue run of Teen Titans reshaped for younger readers. Also, if you’re ever in the Chicago area, take a quick trip to downtown Skokie, where they run a family-friendly comic shop called Aw Yeah Comics! and shop ‘til you drop.

Full of good vibes and big letters, Itty Bitty Hellboy drops on August 28th!

Horror in Art: Three Female Faces of Death

By Keri O’Shea

When we, at least we in the modern West, think about the physical embodiment of death, perhaps the first thing which comes to mind is the figure of the Grim Reaper – a cowled, skeletal character, and one who is typically either straightforwardly masculine, or possibly ambiguous, but certainly not feminine. And yet, throughout the history of the arts in Europe, ‘Death’ has manifested in both male and female form. When I think about the relationship between death and femininity, I always first think of the ubiquity, thanks to the advent of the Gutenberg Press no doubt, of the Danse Macabre (see above) – a popular motif which depicts Death as the Great Leveller, calling to rich and poor, male and female, but not feminine per se. There’s also a strong later tradition of depicting the figure of Death as a menace to (often feminine) youth and beauty, such as in Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and a Woman – a motif which has endured from Nosferatu to the present in horror cinema – but still Death itself does not appear as female here, and although there are instances in literature and painting during the Medieval period, it generally seems much harder to call these to mind. That is, until we come to the Nineteenth Century.

Nosferatu followed hot upon the heels of a fascinating century indeed, one which brought a wave of depictions of Death as distinctly feminine. Massive population increase, devastating epidemics, changing attitudes to the relationships between men and women and an upsurge in the types and availability of the arts, to name just a few factors, fuelled some interesting, and deeply loaded Lady Deaths – in fact, femininity became conflated with death itself in ways which had never been quite so overt. The Nineteenth Century was a time where art, poetry, literature and music was stitched to current cultural attitudes to death in a way it never had been before; this also helped to form the bedrock of the modern horror tradition which we now know and love. A maelstrom of Penny Dreadfuls, true crime, pulp fiction, new monsters and femmes fatales combined in this era, helping to forge a large number more than the three pieces of art I’ve selected below. However, those in the selection have been chosen because they each conflate femininity and death in different, compelling ways.

Félicien Rops – Parodie Humaine (1878)

Belgian artist Rops has strong associations with the Symbolist art movement, but for me he is always the chronicler of the Parisian demi-monde. His drawings and paintings are teeming with the people of the darkest streets; the debased, the fallen, the desperate. His representations of the women who formed part of this world are particularly striking: for evidence of this, compare and contrast contemporary advertisements for Parisian absinthe, which was a massively popular tipple at the time, and then look at Rops’ own absinthe-drinkers; the women of the adverts are all rude health and vigour, whilst the absintheuses are invariably sickly, skinny and predatory. The painting I have chosen goes even further than showing the woman at the street corner as predatory, however; in what has come to be known as La Parodie Humaine (Rops wasn’t too hot on titling his works) the woman is in fact the figure of death, a leering skull hidden behind a mask of beauty and grace. For the somewhat faceless man approaching her, whom she may try to engage as a client, she is the promise of his own demise.

Rops was working at a time when poverty, addiction and also, for at least some of these women, the power to shake off the confining world of marriage and children, sent thousands of women onto the streets. Even for those women who had other ways to feed themselves, they could still find themselves supplementing their earnings by occasionally working as prostitutes; those who were settled at home could yet find their circumstances changed overnight. In an age where there was no concept of State support, there was little other option for many women, and thus the proliferation of venereal disease was inevitable where population growth, destitution and sex as commerce reigned. What Rops has represented symbolically here simply reflects the beliefs of the times – that it was the street-walkers who bore the blame for the spread of diseases like syphilis. As incorrect and unfair as we might see that now, there was definitely much to fear from these infections, and the anxiety at the heart of La Parodie Humaine was that a beautiful woman was in fact the route to illnesses which ultimately promised deformity, madness, and death.

Thomas Cooper Gotch – Death The Bride (1895)

Gotch’s Bride, painted around twenty years after Rops completed La Parodie Humaine, actually, at least ostensibly, has more in common with the radiant women of the old absinthe adverts, with her even complexion, regular features and blithe smile. As she looks directly at us, she is symbolically moving aside her bridal veil, signifying perhaps that the marriage rites are complete – but oddly her veil is jet black, and together with the dark fabric of her dress is far more reminiscent of Victorian mourning garb than a bridal outfit. Gotch’s image of Death as a beautiful young bride is one of the better-known paintings on this theme from the time for the way in which it conflates marriage with dying, Eros with Thanatos, in a way which strongly resonated with the Victorian era.

Sex at this time was synonymous with death, and not just in the way in which Rops represented above, with the implication of disease: the first task undertaken by many newly-married women in the era would be to alter their wedding-clothes into their own shrouds, so expected was a premature demise – but not necessarily through venereal illness. Complications in childbirth killed millions of women during the century; marriage and children may have been socially sanctified and codified, but married women were really no better protected against bleeding to death or dying of infections than the lowliest prostitutes. And yet, for all of this, the Victorians romanticised death in a way which has never been seen before. It was the conventional way of coming to terms with the proximity of death, and the sheer number of deaths which it was commonplace for average families to bear. A new industry of death sprang up, ranging from sentimental verse, commemorative cartes des visites, postmortem photography, memorial jewellery, funeral services and mourning clothing. The clothes which it was permissible for women in mourning to wear was dictated (at least for literate middle class women) by a series of thorough rules: if not followed correctly, these could result in social stigma. Yet, the black crepe dresses and veils were also subject to fashion, expected to show off the waist and the figure just like any other clothing. Gotch’s bride could be seen as symbolic of the way in which young brides balanced sex, or sexuality, with death.

However, her significance broadens when you consider the flowers which both surround her and adorn her. Poppies, with their association with the god Morpheus, the God of Sleep, provided a chemical agent which was the drug of choice during the Nineteenth Century: morphine, more usually rendered into opium or the alcohol-tincture laudanum, served multiple purposes, forming the bedrock of everything from from teething agents for babies to depression medication. It was also used, if not recreationally at least habitually, by millions seeking relief from the industrial drudgery or domestic boredom of their everyday lives, and it was commonplace in accidental deaths, suicides, and murder. Morphine, put simply, offered multiple ways for the people of the century to die. It was necessary, relied upon – and it was dangerous too. Coincidentally, one of the most recognisable women of the century, the Pre-Raphaelite model Lizzie Siddall, used the drug to kill herself; her lover Rossetti eulogised her in his painting Beata Beatrix, where she appears, traced posthumously from his sketches, descending into the eternal sleep, with ephemeral poppy-flowers hovering above her folded hands. To return to Gotch, surrounding his beautiful woman with flowers for whom the symbolism would be obvious to all who looked upon her renders her more of an ambiguous figure than she may at first seem to modern viewers; perhaps that gentle smile threatens harm as well as repose, perhaps that wedding outfit is as symbolic of grief as love. The Bride is in many ways the model Victorian.

Alfred Kubin – The Best Doctor (1901-02)

At the close of the century, Kubin – the ‘Austrian Goya’ – established himself as an artist by illustrating some important and oft-macabre literature of the preceding century, working on texts by Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to name just two. His work was eventually declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis (a compliment if ever there was one) at the point in history where the nascent horror genre was forced into exile, leaving Germany for the safety of the States. As well as his work as an illustrator however, he worked frenetically on works of his own imagination, of which ‘The Best Doctor’ is one.

Of all of the paintings or drawings I’ve included here, this one for me is the most genuinely horrific. A man lies, dying or dead, his hands clasped in prayer – as a female Death lowers over him, dressed in what looks like evening dress, but laughingly closing his eyes like a medic or a priest would, or even smothering him with her hand. Her stance is matter-of-fact, and her face – partially skeletal, with hanging locks of hair, is truly repellent. There’s none of the beauty of Gotch’s Bride and not even any of the artifice of Goya’s street-walker, who at least hides her true ugliness. Kubin’s depiction of Death has more in common with the ghouls and zombies we might recognise in horror today than with the other versions of same here. It could be said that Kubin is, in this respect, looking forward into the Twentieth Century.

But what of the painting’s significance? The title seems to ironically suggest that the ghastly woman can do what the best physician cannot. Yet, in closing the man’s eyes, it suggests that he is already dead. Whether Kubin is implying that all the advances in medicine are ultimately meaningless, or whether he is suggesting that the monstrous woman, in her fashionable evening clothes but with her decaying body, is perhaps emblematic of the inherent danger of women as seen by the artist, is to the best of my knowledge, unknown. There certainly seems to be some cruelty in the actions of this Lady Death which is missing in the other pieces of art, which helps to establish Kubin’s work as a disturbing one, and to my mind far more menacing than the Grim Reapers with which we’re so familiar today.