Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

What Ever Happened to Spooky — Part I

As I’ve said before, Hallowe’en is one of my favourite occasions.  However, I’m starting to get a little disappointed with the whole business.  For the last several years, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of costumes that are, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, downright disgusting.  I’m not talking about the tawdry sexual innuendo that populates Generation Y’s trick or treat choices.  Hallowe’en has always had sexual undertones; this current crowd is just so repressed they can’t control themselves.  Honestly, if you need a child’s holiday to justify unleashing your libido once a year – well, so be it — I don’t care.  No, it’s more than that, getting reflected in how we conduct ourselves on All Hallow’s Eve.

I’ve seen little kids walking around with great huge spikes in their heads, or bloody ax blades sprouting from their stomachs.  I’ve seen their older brothers and sisters as amputee Bo Peeps and their parents as various fairy tales gut-shot and/or eviscerated.  This isn’t right.  There’s nothing frightening about a bad night in the emergency ward.  Vital organs flung around promiscuously aren’t scary; they’re grotesque.  It’s like slowing down to rubber neck an accident: we’re not afraid; we’re curious.  So how did Hallowe’en go from spooky to sickening?  I blame the vampires.

Sometime in the last 30 or so years (oddly enough, the tenure of Generation Y) vampires became cozy.  They lost their edge.  They went from that sinister thing that moves in the night like a dry whisper to the guy next door, lighting his barbeque.  These days, vampires are no more dangerous than the neighbourhood Rottweiler, and quite a bit less likely to bite you.  They (vampires, not Rottweilers) hang out at sporting events and go to high school dances.  They host dinner parties and probably haul out the Trivial Pursuit™ on sunny Sunday afternoons when they can’t go outside and play.  They aren’t evil anymore.  Nobody’s scared of vampires.  In fact, there are battalions of young girls who think it would be cool to marry one.  No big deal, you say?  Crap!  If the evilest of all the evil things human beings have ever thought up in all of our history isn’t evil anymore, then what is?

By teaching an entire generation that vampires are just misunderstood creatures of the slightly cloudy day, our society has, once again, shot itself in the foot — and this time we used a silver bullet.  Like it or not, we need evil and vampires are the embodiment of it.  They haunt the night.  They creep into our dreams.  They coerce our thoughts to satisfy their lust.  They live off the very lifeblood of you, me, Winona Ryder and the kid who delivers the newspaper in the winter morning darkness.  They are supposed to scare the bejesus out of us.  That’s they’re job.

Humans are the dominant species on this planet.  We have no natural predators, so we had to invent some to keep our egos under control.  That’s why we have folktales.  They tell us there are still things that live beyond the reach of our intellectual fires — things that we neither know nor understand.  They are the shadows that shift in the darkness, the glint of momentary eyes and that faint sound of leaves, dry in their rustle.  Without them, we, bold in our knowledge and technology, become godlike in our conceit.

Our ancestors understood that humans are puny in the face of an overwhelming universe.  They honoured their gods and were afraid of their demons.  As we systematically Care Bear that universe we are losing our natural wariness.  If we fear nothing, it’s not because we are brave or there is nothing to fear; it’s because we are childlike in our arrogance.  Vampires and their ilk remind us that “there are more things in heaven and earth” than we, 21st century humans, can possibly understand.  We need them to keep us humble.

Monday: Where did vampires come from and why we still need spooky.

Election 2012: The Real Debate

About the only talking point worth talking about from Monday night’s presidential debate, was nobody played “Beat Up the Moderator!”  Given the amount of flak Jim Lehrer and Candy Crowley took in the first two debates, I’m surprised.   I was looking for Bob Schieffer to show up wearing Kevlar underpants — especially since he’s a known associate of the ever-demonized George W. Bush.  However, Bob’s boy bits remained safe, and that set the tone for the evening.  Neither candidate went for the goolies, although both could have and probably should have.  In the end, it was Obama’s “horses and bayonets” zinger that carried the day, and nobody but Romney partisans is saying the Republican won.  However, the only thing the American people actually learned Monday was President Obama can still argue heaven is hell with the devil and end up with Beelzebub bringing him a cold beer.

In an increasingly war weary America, it’s no wonder both candidates stayed away from talking foreign policy during a foreign policy debate.  In a race that’s this close, nobody wants to be the guy bringing the bad news – especially if your name is Romney.  It’s too late now to do chapter and verse (Barack Obama has left the building) but Mitt missed just about every opportunity he had to score points on the Commander-in-Chief – up to and including the recent debacle in Benghazi.  I don’t think either candidate mentioned President Obama’s drone war on terrorism, and hypothetical or not, Israel is not going to go quietly into an Iranian nuclear nightmare.  These things are real and immediate, and they’re not going to go away (jobs or no jobs in Ohio.)  They need to be talked about.  Certainly by the two guys who think they can handle this kind of action for the next four years — especially since the last four haven’t exactly been a Golden Age in American diplomacy.

The problem is American foreign policy means a lot more to the rest of the world than it does to anybody west of Kennebunkport.  It’s a common fallacy that America wants to beat the rest of the world into submission.  They don’t.  They want to barbeque and watch the ballgame.  (Bless You Boys!)  Actually, especially in times of domestic crisis, Americans don’t worry about what goes on outside their borders.  Throughout most of their history they’ve been confirmed isolationists, trying (as Washington and Jefferson told them) to avoid foreign entanglements.  They don’t honestly care about Syria or Pakistan or even Afghanistan. The only reason it even comes up on the panel is voters have relatives “somewhere” over there getting shot at.  To the average Joe (and Jane) on the American street, the world outside the U. S. of A is either a tourist destination or a wretched place full of angry people who hate them – and they’re not far wrong.  Besides, contrary to popular belief, Americans don’t hold a grudge (they don’t have the attention span) and now that they “got” Bin Laden, they could care less about Aleppo, Abbottabad or the Khyber Pass.  Their major concern is when are Dolores and Delmar coming home?

I think it was James Carville who helped Bill Clinton coin the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” and that’s squarely where this election lies.  It’s all about Alvarez’s job, not Ahmadinejad’s bomb — and rightly so.  The fact is, unless one of these guys can stop the economic hemorrhaging in the next four years, foreign policy won’t even be on the agenda, because somebody else will be running the world.

How to Write a Horror Movie

The last horror movie I paid money to see was The Exorcist in 19 [mumble, mumble.]  It’s a good movie, but I was old enough to know better.  Since then, I’ve lived a full and rewarding life without ever again shelling out coin for cheap adrenaline thrills.  Actually, I’ve had the hell scared out of me for real a couple of times, and I’m in no great hurry to have those feelings artificially induced.  Besides, contemporary horror movies are totally unimaginative.  For the most part, they’re just a series of heart-shocking surprises, stuck together with literal bursts of exaggerated gore.   Let me show you how it’s done.  Here’s a simple three part program that will help you write your own horror movie, and depending on how ambitious you are, take you to the very gates of Horror Movie Heaven: The Slasher Franchise.

First of all, horror movies are driven by the vivid portrayal of a single requisite character: the half dressed young woman.  She is as essential to the horror movie as the horse is to the Western.  If you don’t have at least one girl falling out of what’s left of her clothes, you simply don’t have a horror movie.  Ideally, you need one Alpha female and a couple of expendable best friends who get butchered early, to prove the villain/monster/psycho is serious, but strangers will do.  Actually, the best friends don’t even need names; all they have to do is scream.

From there, you need a boyfriend (he can be a husband as long as he’s newly minted.)  The boyfriend/husband is the catalyst that causes all the problems in the first place.  He’s the guy who ignores everybody’s advice to get the hell out of there and convinces them all to hang around and get murdered.   He comes with his own set of friends, usually a larger, stronger man and an idiot.  The larger, stronger guy gets hacked up later on to prove the villain/monster/psycho can’t be stopped, and the idiot is there for comic relief.  (Nothing much ever happens to him.)  Likewise, the boyfriend, is normally never killed, although he can be badly hurt (and usually is.)  He’s kind of a handsome Wile E. Coyote type who always survives his dumbass schemes to defend himself and the half dressed female.

Secondly, you need to drop everybody’s IQ by about 25%.  Once again, this is a fundamental feature of the horror movie.  The future victims have got to be dumb as a box of hammers and take an active part in their own demise.  For example, when confronted by a dark, rambling mansion or a deserted campsite or what-have-you, the first thing horror movie characters do is the stupidest thing possible: they split up and go exploring.  Together, they could probably protect themselves properly and possibly even beat the villain/monster/psycho bloody; individually, they’re just candidates for a toe tag.  Nor do they ever arm themselves with anything more than a toothbrush.  The villain/monster/psycho has any number of ingenious weapons available to him, but these clowns never even think to pick up a rock.  There is a willing suspension of disbelief in the movies, but the future corpses of horror must defy all reasonable thought.  Never let them grab a garden tool, pick up a kitchen knife or — heaven forbid — in a country as gun crazy as America, carry a pistol.  Also, they must run headlong down blind alleys; wander aimlessly down dark, creaky hallways and never — under any circumstances — turn on the lights.  In short, they should all be stupid enough to get outwitted by sheep.

Third, and least importantly, you need a villain/monster/psycho.  Actually it really doesn’t matter who or what this guy is.  He just needs a steady supply of sharp and/or pointy things to jab into people until they gush for the camera.  Simply remember not to kill him off at the end of the movie — in case the studio wants to pick up an option on Freddy Jason Myers, Part II.

Of course, there are all kinds of things you don’t want cluttering up your movie like plot, character development or dialogue, but those are just tricks of the trade you can learn to suppress as you go along.  Actually, for a quick shortcut to horror movie heaven just get some old Archie Comics, piece together a few of their adventures, add a villain/monster/psycho to massacre a few of them, and you’ve got it made.  Good luck!