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Review + Writer Takeaway: Midsommar

A young couple and their friends travel to Sweden to visit a rural mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat devolves into a violent and bizarre competition at the hands of adherents to an ancient belief system.

 

I watched director Ari Aster’s Hereditary about a year ago, and it still haunts me. Not everyone had my reaction, and that’s fine, but I’m telling you, that was one disturbing damn film. I say that in a good way.

 

So when Midsommar came out, I hesitated; I wasn’t sure I could handle another Aster outing. The film was released in the golden days of 2019, and I decided to watch at last during October 2020, because, what’s a little horror movie compared to reality, amiright?

 

And to be completely transparent, I have not yet seen it. Not all of it. I stopped about halfway because it was getting dark and my stomach was starting to revolt on me as the film gradually got creepier and more gory.

 

I saw enough of it, though, to issue one blistering critique that ruined the film long before it hit Peak Gore.

 

The script of and performances in Midsommar at the top of the show are hyper-realistic and empathetic. We’ve all been on one side or the other of the opening phone calls. Then sudden grief hits, and it hurts to watch, because we’ve been there, too. Aster knows real grief and trauma isn’t, ironically, “Hollywood.” It is real and discordant and no one is pretty when they cry, not really. At the start, the film does a great job of “talk about anything other than what we’re all thinking,” and is worth studying because it is so thoroughly human (or perhaps so thoroughly American?). The cinematography is fantastic too (or at least, has been fantastic up to half way…)

 

New York Times review pooh-pooh’d the performance of Florence Pugh, who plays the lead as Dani, a twenty-something suffering from profound depression long before additional trauma crushes her spirit. The review reduces her to a “walking wound” after the terrible tragedy in her family that opens the film. I see the reviewer’s criticism, but disagree—as someone who struggles with depression and PTSD, I felt the depiction was spot-on.

 

So far so good, eh? Wait for it.

 

At about the hour mark, not even half way into the film, things get dark and gruesome. It was appalling and shocking and effective, all the things a sequence like that should be in a horror movie.

 

But the aftermath of this event, which gruesomely kills two people, consists of two of the male leads getting into an argument over their . . . dissertations.

 

I just want you to picture being out of the country on holiday. Hell, let’s even say you’re travelling for school, for a college degree of some kind. One day into your trip, two people are killed and the folks you’re living with all say, “Oh, sure, did we not tell you? Our bad. This is our way.”

 

Would you stick around to “study” this group some more?

 

The scene immediately after these deaths is . . . um . . . unbelievable? That’s seems too gentle a word. Like, no way in hell would these two react the way they do, and the script hasn’t given us any reason to think they would. The motivations here aren’t just weak, they are nonexistent for any reasonable human being

 

Literally: “That was really, really shocking. I’m trying to keep an open mind, though,” one says.

 

Yeah, no, bro. You fucking run like your hair’s on fire.

 

So at this point, it’s kind of hard to stay tuned in. The morbid curiosity of the horror movie fan is about all the juice I have to keep going. I quit watching about twenty minutes later.

 

Listen—sometimes people do stupid shit, thus, it’s okay for your characters to do stupid shit. An astute reader, as I like to call them, pointed out that in my novel Sick, for instance, which is entirely set inside a high school where a small group of plucky survivors (sound familiar?) try to escape to a Safe Place during a Zombie Apocalypse . . . not a single one of them ever thinks to make a try for the nurse’s office.

 

That’s sort of a mistake, I suppose. If so, it’s a mistake based entirely on the fact that in four years of high school, I never one went to the nurse’s office. I assume we had one, but I swear to God, I don’t know for sure. So yeah, maybe an oversight on my part as the author, but it could be argued in context of the story that there was no need for them to try such a risky gambit. Still . . . yeah, someone should have at least pointed out the option.

 

So that was an oversight on my part. Granted.

 

The choice made at 1h 23m or of Midsommar is not a mistake.

 

It’s a choice, and it falls so flat that I can barely stand it. It’s infuriating, really, because I’m a big fan of Hereditary (in that it freaked me out so much I’ll never watch it again. That’s high praise). While the script sets up that our intrepid Americans are in fact doctoral candidates, it in no way emphasizes the great lengths to which they’ll go to get their “scoop” story for that dissertation. Furthermore, even if the script had tried to emphasize such a thing, the fact that their reaction to the horror unfolding before them is to argue about those dissertations rather than saying, “Bro, where’s the key to the car?!” is unforgiveable from a character-development standpoint. I would be happy to go along with this premise if the script had established just how critical obtaining these degrees was to the characters, but it doesn’t.

 

Of late, and I may come to regret this, I’ve tried as much as possible to insist on realism in my horror. When I’m writing or building an outline, I try to stop frequently and ask, “Now what would someone really do here?” You can motivate a character to do just about anything, and then come up with a really fun way to prevent them from getting their goal—that’s the whole point, in fact. Midsommar does not take this approach at all. It pits graphic violence against, of all things, academia, and it just does not sell for me.

 

Let your characters be real people who have real reaction commensurate with their background. Jack Bauer and Rambo and whoever else aren’t going to have a panic attack when they shoot someone. But I would. You would, too (one hopes). Those reactions are commensurate with our experience. So if you’re going to do something that would strike most people as odd, be sure it’s backed up in the character’s backstory somewhere.

 

Don’t be afraid to ask open-ended questions of your characters when you come to these choices. You may discover some rich gems hiding. I am working on a novel that I can’t talk about right now, but: in the story, this main character was knowingly entering into a situation where she may be called upon to take a life. Maybe several. How the hell do I motivate that? What would make a person do that? What has happened in her past to make her . . . ohhhh! GOT IT!

 

See what I mean? I made a brand new discovery about her history that gives the novel a whole new resonance.

 Do this, please, whenever your can. I don’t mind mindless horror from time to time, it has its place. So does mindless YA, mindless romance, mindless mystery. Swell. But if you’re setting out to make something else, which Midsommar is clearly trying to do, then for God’s sake, motivate those characters to justify the stupid shit they do on the page.

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Review + Writer Takeaway: Train to Busan

Train to Busan pits a band of survivors against a speeding train full of zombies.

 

I mean, really, what else is there to know?

 

The film goes on as most zombie films that have taken a class or two in pacing, letting the opening build relationships and lay out the scenario before the horror begins. By 13 minutes in, we’ve seen this all before, but the script and performances do their job, endearing us to a businessman Dad, his daughter, and their family plight, which is the couple’s impending divorce.

 

But then right around 15:00, shit gets real.

 

Suddenly the passenger train is filled with infected undead, who merrily and bloodily go about creating more of themselves as they feast on the passengers. The great physical performances by the infected deserve recognition. These impressive acrobatics are accentuated wonderfully by the music, sound effects, and cinematography.

 

There’s not much we haven’t seen before — lots of hair-raising near-misses and escapes, and wondering which of the rag tag group of spunky survivors will be next to go. (I will say when the last of them clocks out, it is pretty tragic.) The addition of the train as the primary setting gives the goings-on a nice sense of, pardon me: momentum.

 

Like many zombie flicks, the ultimate cause of the zombie outbreak is left pretty vague, although it is somewhat addressed in a quick phone call just past the halfway mark.

 

It feels, though, that mostly the filmmakers are simply building on what others have done before without adding anything particularly new to the canon. The rules are the same: don’t be seen, don’t be heard, don’t get bit, keep going like a bat outta hell for the One Place That’s Safe while Protecting Those You Love . . . with a splash of Who Are The Real Monsters?! mixed in.

 

It is not a bad thing that these tropes are well-worn. They are well-worn for a reason. If you pick up a film like Train to Busan after seeing the trailer, it’s because you have genre expectations. Those expectations are met well in Train. So while there’s nothing new here, the film is a hell of a lot of fun for fans of the genre.

 

The math is simple: If you like zombie movies, you will like Train to Busan.

TAKEAWAYS FOR WRITERS

Use gestures and the environment to reveal character rather than narration. When Dad is on a angry call with his ex-wife, but still gives his fancy sports car a quick cleaning with the sleeve of his coat, that says something. When he is quietly arguing with his mother about the divorce in his bedroom, putting away his clothes, and every shirt and jacket is exactly the same and hung in fastidious rows…that says something, too.

When one of the train workers is asked to “fix” her tie because it’s askew by an inch or two, we are shown that the society in this film esteems order. In other words: a perfect contrasting backdrop for the anarchy of a zombie apocalypse.

Also, in case you ever wondered: Yes, your story has already been done. Take heart: They all have. Mine, yours. Even Shakespeare ripped off most of his stuff. But your story never been done by you. Trust in your voice and perspective. Unless you are outright trying to copy someone (which is a good idea in privacy to learn the craft, but a terrible idea to do for something you’d try to publish), develop and trust your own way of executing a story, even if it’s one we’ve all heard.

Whatever your story is, tell it your way.

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Book Review: ARARAT, by Christopher Golden

tl;dr? watch it here

Christopher Golden has constructed a place you never want to go but that you cannot stop reading about.

The novel Ararat takes place on the mountain of the same name, where Noah’s Ark is reputed to have come to rest. That’s exactly what the novel seems to be about, when an earthquake unearths what appears to be remnants of a giant ship. But when scientists ascend the mountain to study the discovery, they quickly find that there’s something in there that should not be. Whether it’s Noah’s ark at all becomes secondary to survival as the team squares off with a chilling and brutal entity that will feed off the reader’s worst fears!

As a horror writer, I have many different tools available to scare you. One of those tools is dread, which is not the same as horror, terror, or the gross-out. Dread is a tough one to do, because it requires patience and precise words and pacing. Golden has done that here. He doesn’t hide his monster, it’s in plain sight the entire story, yet the dread just builds and builds until you are forced to stay up long after dark, reading to see when things will finally burst.

The author and I were both nominated for the Bram Stoker Award the same year (in different categories), and Ararat won that year. I have not met Christopher Golden, but I have met Joe Hill and other horror authors who speak highly of him and there’s no question he’s at the top of his game when it comes to dread. So whether you are a reader who loves horror novels or a writer who’s looking to sharpen that particular tool in your toolbox, I highly recommend reading this Bram Stoker Award winner.