The Amityville Horror--Déjà Vu All Over Again

This post contains spoilers for Jay Anson's novel The Amityville Horror.

I can’t be the only person reading this and feeling the arc and "reader feels" of The Shining, which, since I read it two weeks ago is still very fresh in my mind. The Amityville Horror has a slow-burning start with loads of backstory. Unlike The Shining, anything horrific is told with emotional detachment, so it doesn’t feel gut wrenching. At all. It’s a little inferior in that respect, but not terribly. Also unlike The Shining these characters don’t seem to have anything particularly wrong with them. They were just fine—right up until they encountered the house. But there is a similarity. It (the house/demonic force) affects each of the family members differently, and one family member in particular. And that one is the five year old. Everyone’s behavior changes, but the dad becomes impatient, particularly with the children. And it’s cold. And that hedge/stone lion moves. And being born with a caul causes psychic ability. Rip off.

But then Twilight was a rip off of Pride and Prejudice, and did I like it? Damned straight, I did.

I’m not saying it’s not worth reading. In fact, I think I enjoyed this reading experience better because once the tension built, it maintained a consistent level of enjoyable WTF, without pushing me beyond my comfort zone. Stephen King, however, almost always pushes me past where I’m comfortable. Some things I particularly liked: The way the house affects EVERYONE, including those who simply visit. AND that a momentary interaction with the house is enough for them to carry its malevolence away with them, like a virus. The priest with his car trouble, flu, and blisters. The brother and his money. Even the paranormal investigator who catches the flu before even arriving. It’s interesting that the house’s power isn’t constrained to just the property on which it stands. It tags along, effing things up for people who even think about the place. That’s fun.

Gawd, I’m shaping up to be such a pessimist. I hate to harp on what I didn’t like. Really, The Amityvile Horror was a fun read, and I didn’t want to put it down. I’d totally read another Jay Anson book—probably 666, which is the only one he wrote between Amityville Horror (1977) and his death in 1980.

But sometimes the action in this book was down-right irritating. Like, hey, crazy shit is happening in this house. Stone lions moving, weird smells, unseen presences, but it doesn’t even occur to Kathy, the mom, that the green goo could be a paranormal manifestation too (226). It must be those blasted kids. And when George (the dad) brings his dog inside to see if he senses anything, the dog reacts to exactly the things we expect him to—the secret room in the cellar, the sewing room, and Missy’s room. And George acts like he doesn’t understand why the dog would possibly behave strangely—“‘Goddammit, Harry…What’s bugging you?’”—when that’s exactly why he’s dragging the dog room-to-room in the first place. And then—“‘Nothing happened, that’s what happened,’ he said” (259). Perhaps he was expecting the dog to write a dissertation regarding his suspicions and discomfort, since George is blind to canine forms of communication. Sigh.

And then there’s the priest—Father Mancuso. I get why he wouldn’t want to go back to the house, but why doesn’t he just send another priest. Or someone to attempt an exorcism? He’s just like, “Sorry, suckas—you’re on your own. I’m not going to help you, therefore the Church can’t help you.” Thanks, buddy. May your itchy palms sprout humiliating hairs.

Based on a true story, my ass. But I wonder how much it increases a book’s sales if you swear on your grandmother’s grave that it’s true. Not that I’m interested in besmirching my grandmother’s grave. I’m just curious. Ahem. For a friend, of course.

Anson, Jay. The Amityville Horror. New York: Pocket Star, 1977. Print.

The Others—It’s a Lot Like That One Movie

Hey.

This post contains spoilers for the movie The Others. Don’t read on unless you’ve already watched it.

And if you haven't, you need to.

The Others opened like any good horror movie should—with a scream. Okay, maybe it did strike me as a little cliché, but I didn’t mind the cheap gag. The producers were forgiven as soon as the camera panned out to include the antique architecture and décor—I could watch that all day. In fact, since this movie was filmed on location rather than on a sound stage, I watched it a second time just to focus on the set.

So here's what happens: A mom and her two allergic-to-light kids live in a fabulous old house in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Oh, and that house is probably haunted. The mom hires random strangers as house help, and the audience gets the definite idea there’s something dodgy with them, but they’re more likable than the main character. The kids allege that the house is haunted by a boy named Victor—which is a scary effing name if you ask me (I’m talking about you, Cypert)—and a lot of not much happens, but I think we’re supposed to be frightened by paranormal occurrences and the diminishing sanity of the mom. The husband/father comes back from WWII. Then he leaves because he’s not real. The mom gets crazier. The ghosts (or the Others) manifest until we realize that they’re the real people and Nicole Kidman and her kids have been dead all along. And, oh yeah, she killed them. That was the scary part—a mom who loves her kids can kill them in a fit of insanity.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find this movie scary at all—and my husband would totally call me out on it because he was trying to sleep and I kept waking him up to keep me company. (That’s happened a lot this semester.) But it took a long time to build tension. I don’t mind that so much—I wasn’t bored—I just wasn’t scared. I doubt anyone was terribly surprised to find out the house-help were dead, or that the war-scarred husband/father was also dead, so in that way I started to smell an element of The Sixth Sense, and even said so to my unconscious husband. And still, after saying it aloud to him, it didn’t even cross my mind the flip the writer would pull, with the entire main cast being ghosts, haunted by the living in their spaces. And I do so love that concept. Imagine ghosts being terrified of the “normal” activity around them. Clever. Better than Beetlejuice.

I know we’ve talked about that good surprise/bad surprise thing in our Horror RIG discussions, and in that conversation several of you talked about disliking the twist for the sake of the twist or something like that. Because it gets old. And, yeah, it probably does, especially if the writer/director makes a habit of it, and you expect it. So maybe in this genre the more widely read you are, the less you enjoy the experience—picking up clues and patterns faster. But I didn’t see it coming this time. And I flipping loved it. But when I watched it the second time, it was really just some boring stuff that happened in a beautiful old house.

The Others. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Nicole Kidman. Buena Vista, 2001. DVD.

The Shining--Colorado from an outsider's perspective. There was snow. And big deer things.

I love Stephen King’s work. Yeah, that’s what I meant.

His interviews are pretty amusing.

This: 

Stephen King On Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, Lovecraft & More (55:51)

And this: 

Has Stephen King Won Writing?

And I love his insights on the creative lifestyle, pantsing vs. plotting, and substance abuse in

Since this was my third read of The Shining I thought I’d listen to the audiobook. A good idea on paper, maybe, but it turns out I read a little faster to myself than Campbell Scott does aloud, so that wasn’t really saving me time. And I missed Stephen King’s voice. I couldn’t hear it while someone else was reading. So I read it the usual way. Again. And I liked it again.

I used to have a quote on my classroom wall that read, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” ― Heraclitus

That’s how I felt about reading The Shining again. It was not the same book for me this time. I’m not the same person. I’m a mom now. It took me three days to get through the arm-breaking scene this time because I had to keep walking away from it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other parents felt similarly. I think in my pre-kids days I found the same scene upsetting, but probably not as nauseating.

You know what else I am? A fault-finder. I should really knock that off because I think (whatever…I KNOW) it’s getting in the way of my enjoyment of reading. Stephen King is SO GOOD at writing disturbing stuff, but I totally got hung up on his classic outsider misconception of how much snow falls in Colorado. “By November the snow up there in the mountains would be higher than the beetle’s roof…maybe higher than three beetles stacked on top of each other” (33). Colorado is a high desert. Sure a freak storm could dump snow like that, but you know what's a more common sight in Estes Park in December? The ground. Snow falls, then after a week or two it either melts off or sublimates because it’s too damned dry to stick around. Stephen King lives in Bangor, Maine, where the average annual snowfall is 56 inches. (www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/maine/bangor). You know what it is in Estes Park? 34 inches. If all the snow for the entire year fell at once, it would just about reach a VW’s door handle. But, whatevs, it was a snow year for the Torrance family.

I was able to get over the Overlook not ACTUALLY being the Stanley Hotel—the hotel that inspired the book. “Some of the most beautiful resort hotels in the world are located in Colorado, but the hotel in these pages is based on none of them. The Overlook and the people associated with it exist wholly within the author’s imagination." So the Overlook is in the middle of nowhere and NOT actually right behind a Safeway and a McDonalds. And in StephenKingLand, Colorado gets a lot more precipitation. You know what else Colorado has in StephenKingLand? Caribou.

“We might see some deer. Or caribou” (61). “They had seen caribou tracks in the snow and once the caribou themselves, a group of five standing motionlessly below the security fence” (213).

I double checked this to be certain, because at first I was like, “What? Caribou?” But yeah. Not here. “The last herd of caribou to roam as far south as Colorado probably lived during the Pleistocene” http://www.denverpost.com/ci_4514208?source=rss

I have seen a real live caribou in Colorado. Someone up at Keystone had one on a leash and he tied it to a tree while he stopped in at a bar. The caribou waited outside like a patient Labrador. That’s because caribou (reindeer) are domesticable. If they weren’t, Santa would have to get sled dogs.

Caribou:

We have elk though. They’re a lot bigger. I don’t think I’d try to walk one with a leash. They can be kind of mean.

Elk:  

Lesson: Even if your name is Stephen Effing King, do your homework or you’ll irritate your readers. And the guy lived here (in Boulder) when he wrote The Shining, but, you know, in 1974 Al Gore hadn’t yet invented the internet.

King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Anchor Books, 2012.