REPOST: Stephen King and son Joe Hill praise Del Toro's Crimson Peak

Seven months from now, we'd see another Guillermo del Toro masterpiece unfold before our eyes. His films are known for their strong cult following and his upcoming mystery-horror project called Crimson Peak should not be any different.

Image source: blastr.com

Even when you’re as accomplished a filmmaker as Guillermo del Toro, some endorsements must still be exciting to hear.

That had to be the case over the weekend, when del Toro's upcoming Gothic horror movie, Crimson Peak, was screened for no less an authority on terror than Stephen King, who tweeted his approval on Monday:

"Was treated to a screening of Guillermo del Toro's new movie, CRIMSON PEAK, this weekend. Gorgeous and just f*****g terrifying... CRIMSON PEAK electrified me in the same way Sam Rami's EVIL DEAD electrified me when I saw it for the first time way back in the day."

Joining his dad for the special sneak preview was King's son, Joe Hill, who's built his own acclaimed body of work with novels like Heart-Shaped Box and his award-winning comic book Locke & Key. It seems like father and son were on the same page when it came to Crimson Peak:

"Remember that list I tweeted the other day, the 13 most beautiful horror films. CRIMSON PEAK is the most beautiful of all... CRIMSON PEAK is Del Toro's blood-soaked AGE OF INNOCENCE, a gloriously sick waltz through Daphne Du Maurier territory."

According to Slashfilm, del Toro has more or less completed the film and must feel confident enough to start showing it to VIPs seven months ahead of its release. When two of those VIPs are one of the greatest living horror writers of our time and his formidably talented offspring -- both of whom heaped praise on the movie -- then del Toro must feel like he's on the right track.

We'll see if any more screenings and reactions surface ahead of the movie's release, but in the meantime we'll have to be satisfied with watching the sumptuous trailer again. Crimson Peak stars Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Hunnam and opens Oct. 16.

I’m Zachary Wood, Orlando native and an avid fan of mystery fiction, water sports, and travel. For discussions on anything mysterious, adventurous, and arresting, follow me on Twitter.

REPOST: Stranger Than Crime Fiction

Life is stranger than fiction, the old aphorism goes. Forensic specialists have witnessed to gorier evidence and uncovered more outlandish plots than P.D. James or Michael Connelly could purvey. In that regard, the science of crime investigation offers valuable help for mystery writers in reinforcing suspension of disbelief into their works. Scottish novelist Val McDermid believes likewise. She talks about her first nonfiction work on crime and forensics in this Slate.com article.  

Image Source: slate.com

Val McDermid is a Scottish crime writer who has penned more than 30 novels. To coincide with a new Wellcome Trust exhibition, she has written a nonfiction book on the history of forensic science, Forensics: The Anatomy of a Crime. Telling the truth about science can help create the suspension of disbelief that is vital to good fiction, she says.

How has forensic science influenced your writing up until now?

It helps me to anchor my books in the real world. Everybody knows crimes don't get solved the way we write about them in crime fiction; it's not one grumpy inspector and a sergeant buying the pints. But anything I can do to bolster your suspension of disbelief is valuable. If I tell you the truth about the science, it helps make you think I must be telling the truth about all the stuff I'm making up.

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Where do your story ideas come from?

It's things that make me go “wow.” For instance, I once rang up the forensic anthropologist Sue Black at the University of Dundee because I wanted to know what your tattoos would look like if you'd been submerged in a bog for 200 years. She said that when you get a tattoo, the nearest lymph nodes take up the ink. It occurred to me that if the tattoo was made after death, there wouldn't be any staining on the lymph nodes: I had a starting point for a novella. I snap up trifles like that. It's the same thing that makes me good at pub quizzes.

How much scientific research do you do for your novels?

It depends on the book. I might just ring up a forensics specialist and say: “I want this piece of evidence to lead to this; how do I do it?” Very often the stuff that really works comes in at tangents—the conversation leads to something much more interesting. In general, the scientists are just delighted that anyone is interested in their work.

Were you surprised by anything you learned while researching your new nonfiction book?

Over the years I've spent a lot of time with people who do this for real, so I have a pretty good idea of how completely unlike CSI or Silent Witness it is. But the truth is often stranger than fiction. For instance, I interviewed a researcher who investigates the synthesis of illegal drugs. She told me that at any given time, she's got a cupboard full of crystal meth. At one point she had her Ph.D. students going out to buy decongestants for the raw ingredients to make it.

Crime novelists and screenwriters have been blamed for giving jurors unrealistic ideas of forensic evidence. Is that a fair criticism?

I think it happens, though it surprises me that people are that naive. I suppose that when evidence is presented week after week with an aura of scientific certainty, it does have an effect. You could argue that we should take more responsibility, but it is entertainment.

By and large, I try to be pretty accurate in how I write about the science. But sometimes you do need to make changes for dramatic necessity—for instance, squeezing a test that would take three weeks into two days. That's the area where we mostly fall down—compressing time frames.

Will your new book change people's views?

I hope readers take away a greater understanding of the science, as well as an appreciation of the integrity and commitment of the kind of people who do this work. What they do is just as important to the living as it is to the dead.

I am Zachary Wood, a huge fan of spine-chilling, emotionally arresting novels. Let's talk more about the convoluted plots and quick-witted sleuths on Twitter.

REPOST: It's Time to Bring Back the Banality of Evil

Cool ivory tower bad guys have become de rigeur in entertainment media today and its frankly getting old. Esther Inglis-Arkell of i09.com explains why we need to rediscover the commonness (and therefore, scariness) of evil.  

Image Source: io9.com

What makes people become murderers? If you are watching shows like Hannibal and Dexter, you'd think it had to do with their exceptionally refined moral sensibilities and sheer genius. This trope is getting tired. Have we forgotten about the horrifyingly commonplace nature of evil?

The Fascinating Murderer

All over television, detectives are wading deep into the minds of murderers. They're drawn into a moral limbo, where they question everything they ever knew about law and morality. They share mental space with serial killers, riding the line between good and evil. They sometimes doing things they could never have imagined themselves doing. They kill.

And why not? If you take a look at these shows, murder seems like the best possible use of one's time. Murderers are creative artists, well-read intellectuals, social successes, and political players - often all at the same time. You can't argue with results.

Murder isn't a debilitating drain on their energy and a danger to their lives. It's a way to express, and implement, their own personal philosophy. Hannibal Lecter weeds out the rude and stupid, while attempting to cherish the exceptional. The killer in the BBC's The Fall quotes Nietzsche - "You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star" - and frames his murders as an expression of the chaos and the indifference of the universe. Dexter Morgan, from Dexter, famously rhapsodized about his "dark passenger" driving him to kill and mused about all those baffling normal people around him. Watch enough of these and you get the idea that serial murder is something between a master's thesis and really aggressive social work.

Just in case we don't get exactly how blown away we should be by a debonair genius's internal workings, we get a law officer to point them out to us. We spend long scenes with them, looking at polaroids, or better yet, sketches of the killer's crime scenes. We watch them frown thoughtfully over the killer's artfully-worded letters. And, if need be, they lean back in their chairs and explain away any thoughts we might have about the killer being crass or trite.

The Necessary Ingredients for the Perfect Murderer

There are set guidelines that every show has to follow if they're to include an artistic-genius murderer. The guidelines involve both aesthetics and morals.

Always Show Beautiful Gore

 

True Detective's first murder is a work of art that becomes a literal work of art. Intense Texan detective Rust Cohle sketches the titian-haired victim with her crown of antlers and her spiral tattoo. The Fall's Paul Spector leaves his strangled victim naked, washed, and artfully posed on her bed so the light from her window can cause her unmarked skin to glow white. Hannibal's murder scenes are gruesome, but stylish and beautiful, like medieval paintings of saints being flayed alive. Even Dexter, whose murderer is on the low-achieving end of this list, has beautiful gore. The show gives us gore in seemingly innocent situations. The breathtaking opening credits suggest the gore of a murder as Dexter goes about an ordinary morning - pulling a shirt tight over his face as he dresses, pulping a blood orange for juice, and bloodily swatting a mosquito.

If we're to see murderers as artists, we have to see their work as art. These shows make sure we do.

 

Never Go Too Far Aesthetically or Morally

Audiences don't tune in to serial killer shows because we're shocked by the subject matter. We have morbid curiosity and we want to be thrilled. What we don't want to be is disgusted, grieved, or really offended. All of these shows make sure we never are. The Fall is a perfect example of this.

Image Source: io9.com

Paul Spector is a loving husband and father and a conscientious grief counselor, who stalks and kills young, attractive, dark-haired, professional women. He kills them by strangling them. Does he rape them? No, of course not. People may tolerate a sympathetic portrait of a man who kills women, but they won't stand for a serial rapist.

How about sex after they're dead? He clearly stalks them in a sexual way, taking out their underwear and snipping off the bows to take home. After he strangles the women, he bathes them, cuddling with them as he cuts their hair and paints their nails. But there's no sex. This is not just a moral principle but an aesthetic one. He's a tortured artist. No one's going to show him humping a corpse, not even if he leaves her pretty afterwards. When the police finally profile him, based on his crimes, what do they decide makes him kill? Misogyny? Rage? A desire to dominate? Well maybe, but the profilers end their session by saying, "It's about intimacy." He wants to be intimate with his victims. How human. How understandable. How interesting.

 

Ladle on the Philosophy

Some people will object to my inclusion of True Detective on this list. After all, the ultimate murderers aren't artistic geniuses. But, as most recaps and essays about the show stress, the murderers of Dora Lange aren't the point of the show. In part, this is because the detectives never completely uncover the web of conspiracy behind the Yellow King, Carcosa, or anything else surrounding the murder - including who set up the beautiful crime scene and why they did it.

But really the show is mostly concerned with the relationship between the two detectives as they ponder questions about life, death, and evil. This is why we get Rust Cohle. He technically is a murderer when he comes into the show. He's held out as the main suspect in multiple women's murders for a good part of it. And what does he do, as we wonder if he killed these women? He talks about how sentient life is a cosmic mistake and should be destroyed, how everything is meaningless, and how he meditates on "the idea of allowing your own crucifixion."

So do the rest of the genius killers. Whether the shows are dramas, mysteries, or black comedies, you always get a healthy dose of talk about the cruelty and indifference of nature, the meaninglessness of existence, and the howling emptiness that makes killing (or dying) the only intelligent choice.

There's Always Someone Worse

Dexter, the show about the serial killer who only kills other killers, is pretty much built on this idea. Dexter Morgan kills someone far worse than he is nearly every episode. But the show that most relies on this idea for its existence is Hannibal. Hannibal Lecter has done some godawful things, including kidnapping and removing the hand of an FBI trainee, cutting a twenty-year-old's throat, and letting his best friend in the world go nearly insane due to an untreated case of encephalitis. He's not the hero. He may not even be likable. But he's not the worst person on any season of the show.

In the last season, for example, we got Mason Verger, a homophobic incestuous rapist millionaire who collects tears from his victims to flavor his cocktails and has his own sister sterilized to secure his hold over the family fortune. When Verger's around, it's tough to hate anyone else. Pick any show, it's the same. From psychotic wife beaters who threaten children to senators who run murder cults, there's always someone worse than the artist-killer.

Making Evil Both Banal and Interesting

Individually, these shows are good. It's the aggregate, and the lack of alternatives, that's terrible. The idea of the genius-artist-philosopher-killer has become stagnant and dull. Everywhere you look, it's the same boring nihilism, the same boring excuses, and the same slightly-creepy glamour - which is growing boring.

The fact that there is such an extreme concentration of fictional serial killers in one area means there is plenty of room to explore. Any show in which an FBI agent doesn't puzzle over cryptic messages written under the wallpaper of an abandoned hotel room, and in which the killer doesn't feel the need to doesn't inform us of his feelings on Sartre, would be a good start.

Image Source: io9.com

How about this: according to one review of modern serial killers, thirty percent of serial killers are motivated by financial gain. Wouldn't that be interesting? A story about how a killer manages to get away with murder, again and again, as a way of making a comfortable living? The killer wouldn't have to be a genius, or a tortured artist. They'd just have to be lazy, uninteresting person who figured out a way to scam the system.

Maybe we can do away with the brilliant killer and his near-godlike powers. It's not a reflection of reality. It seems that organized serial killers - killers who meticulously plan their crimes and tend to have normal lives outside the scope of their crimes - have an average IQ of 98.5. That's below the population average. Disorganized killers - who live their lives as criminals and tend to act on impulse - have an average IQ of 92.6. Mixed serial killers, who display both organized and disorganized traits, tend to have an above-average IQ of 108.4, but they're not geniuses.

You may argue that some killers are incredibly clever, and the shows are right to focus on those. Here is a list of 21 killers with near-genius or genius level IQ scores. If you look through it, you'll notice something fairly common. Even the smart ones have arrest records. Jeffrey Dahmer, in the middle of his killing period, was arrested and convicted for molestation. He had an IQ of 145. Gary Heidnik, IQ of 130, was jailed several times for crimes like rape and false imprisonment before he started his serial killing. Laurence Bittaker, IQ 138, was jailed again and again for crimes that included burglary, theft, and even murder, before he became a serial killer of young women. Caroll Edward Cole, IQ 158, went to jail for arson and for attempting to strangle a child before he started successfully killing women. The most famous person on the list, Nathan Leopold, had an IQ of 210 and was a child prodigy. He graduated with honors from the University of Chicago. After he was released from prison, he became a mathematics professor at a school where, presumably, the administration was extremely liberal and the dorm rooms were extremely secure. He technically shouldn't be on the list. He killed only one person - an adolescent boy - in an attempt to commit the perfect murder. He was caught.

The point is, being very smart does not make anyone even passably good at crime. Criminals test the waters, they make mistakes, and they improve. And how much more chilling would it be to see an average killer get better than to see a cultured genius of a killer who is already perfect? What if, instead of being in suspense about what cryptic message the handsome, artistic killer will choose to tattoo on the instep of his next victim, we had to wonder if this young woman (or, great heavens, young man) we see on screen will actually be the first victim? Or this one? Or the one after that? What, in short, if a show about a killer was actually about killing, and not about two people discussing philosophy?

Zachary Wood, fan of arresting mystery novels, calling from Orlando here reminding you folks at home that crime doesn’t pay, no matter what Dex or Hannibal tells you. Following me on Twitter, however, might.

REPOST: The 100 best novels: 53 – The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Guardian listed 100 best novels of all time, and rank 53 goes to Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ Learn more about his very first novel, which was released way back in the 1920s, in the article below: 

Image Source: theguardian.com

‘He craved the company of risk-takers… and longed to be accepted by them’: Ernest Hemingway. Photograph: NBC/Photo Bank

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Corey Stoll makes a scene-stealing appearance as the young Ernest Hemingway, tough-guy modernist and friend of Gertrude Stein. It’s a cameo grounded in the truth that, for one of America’s 20th-century greats, Paris in the 20s was a source of artistic liberation. It was also the setting for the first section of Hemingway’s first, and best, novel (published in the UK as Fiesta).

The novel, a roman à clef describing an anguished love affair between the expatriate American war veteran Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, a femme fatale representative in the writer’s mind of 1920s womanhood, is mostly located in Spain, Hemingway’s favourite country. For some critics, the heart of the novel is the bullfight, and how each character responds to the experience of the corrida. At the same time, the escape into the wild is a great American theme that recurs in the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain (Nos 16, 17 and 23 in this series). In addition, The Sun Also Rises, like most novels of the 1920s, is a response to the author’s recent wartime service.

The key to Hemingway, the thing that unlocks the most important doors to his creative life, was a deeper, more personal darkness, his complicated experience of the first world war. There are two versions. Either he was rejected for poor eyesight; or he failed to enlist and instead joined up as an ambulance driver. Each way, in the short-term, he was wounded by the shame of rejection and cowardice.

However, once with the Red Cross, Hemingway got as badly injured as if he’d been in combat. Thereafter, throughout his life, he craved the company of risk-takers – bullfighters or big-game hunters – and longed to be accepted by them. Courage, cowardice and manly authenticity in extremis became his themes.

 

 

Perhaps this is also the inspiration for his famously hard-boiled prose. The best of Hemingway’s fiction, at its purest and most influential, is found in his stories, but this first novel is also a literary landmark that earns its reputation as a modern classic.

A note on the text

Hemingway began writing the novel with the working title of Fiesta on his birthday, 21 July, in 1925. He completed the draft manuscript about eight weeks later, in September, and went on to revise it further during the winter of 1926.

The novel is based on a trip he made from Paris to Pamplona, Spain in 1924 with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and the American writer John Dos Passos. Hemingway returned again in June 1925 with another group of American and British expats. Their experiences and complex romantic entanglements became absorbed into the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises.

In the US, Scribner’s published the novel on 22 October 1926. Its first edition, just over 5,000 copies, sold well. The Hellenistic-style cover illustration by Cleonike Damianakes showed a seated, robed woman, head bent, eyes closed, shoulders and thigh exposed. Hemingway’s editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins, wrote that “Cleon’s respectably sexy” artwork was designed to attract “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels”. Within two months, The Sun Also Rises was in a second printing, with many subsequent printings to follow. In 1927 the novel was published in the UK by Cape under the title Fiesta. In fact, The Sun Also Rises has been in print continuously since its publication in 1926, and is said to be one of the most translated titles in the world.


 I’m Zachary Wood, an Orlando resident and a huge follower of Ernest Hemingway’s arresting works. Follow me on Twitter for more literary discussions.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: A mini-review

 “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is a 2011 espionage/mystery film based on John Le Carré’s novel of the same title. Set in London in the early 1970s, the film follows the quest of veteran MI6 official George Smiley (Gary Oldman), called out of retirement by the Civil Service, to expose a Soviet double agent hiding among MI6’s—the Circus, in their own spyspeak--top ranks. With help from a younger Circus fixture named Peter Guillam (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), Smiley surreptitiously trails the mole following leads from a botched mission in Budapest authorized by the deceased Chief.

 

Image Source: fanpop.com

Smiley was famously portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness in a 1979 BBC series, and the more senior of Le Carré fans frequently compare Guinness’ portrayal with that of Oldman. The new Smiley holds his own, however; only an actor of Oldman’s caliber can express cold, intense cunning behind a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals. Also, there’s a bit of personal amusement watching Oldman schooling Cumberbatch (Sherlock?) in the art of sleuthing.

Image Source: unrealitymag.com

The director, Tomas Alfredson, didn’t intend the film as easy viewing: It’s anti-James Bond, so to speak. Condensing a Le Carré novel into a single film is a feat in itself, and screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan did a terrific job at preserving suspicion and anxiety without making the film too weighty. Still, one needs to turn on the subtitles to get hold of all the British spy lingo peppered throughout.

 

Image Source: telegraph.co.uk

 
To sum it up, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” benefits from an intelligent script, with characters played by intelligent actors, and will probably earn Le Carré plenty of new fans. An excellent showcase of drama and suspense, it’s considered one of the best mystery films of 2011.

 I’m Zachary Wood, Orlando resident and a huge enthusiast of mystery fiction. Visit this Google+ page for more of my thoughts and insights about these arresting works.

The greatest sleuths, as seen on TV

Fans of mystery fiction would agree with me: Some of the greatest private eyes in fiction are not found in books. They are, or were, in TV screens, solving one complex, controversial crime after another, week after week. My favorites through the years have been the offbeat ones: Columbo, Morse, and Adrian Monk:

Image Source: 20minutes.fr

 Lieutenant Columbo. This detective, whose first name remains a mystery, deserves a spot here; after all, he's one of TV's foremost detectives, and the show itself presented a groundbreaking take on the whodunit at that time: Each episode began with audiences already knowing the culprit. It made viewers witnesses to how the crime was committed and how Columbo, in his disheveled disguise and feigned dimwittedness, would outsmart even the sharpest-witted murderer.  

Image Source: thegurdian.com

Inspector Morse. Like Columbo, this lead character of the successful British series is the exact opposite of the prototype fictional detective. Unlike Magnum, Crockett, and Starsky and Hutch, Morse isn't young and brawny, doesn't possess hip and suave looks, and doesn't drive fancy cars. Instead, he is a cranky, high-brow, art-loving fella. But such characteristics came in handy as he solved crimes in aristocratic Britain: In one episode, when valuable erotic paintings were stolen from a mansion, he searched for and found answers by using his knowledge of how the minds of the rich and famous work.  

Image Source: bs.wikipedia.org

Adrian Monk. At first glance, and TIME's Lily Rothman would agree, this neurotic detective is an odd candidate. But to me, it's their quirks that make great P.I.s tick, and Monk, with his obsessive-compulsive and phobic tendencies, fits the bill quite well. These same propensities, coupled with his sharp memory, would help him stumble upon the answers to mysteries behind the crimes he handled. But more than his ability to solve crimes, his accidentally funny behavior endeared him to legions of audiences, me included.  

I am Zachary Wood, Orlando resident and a fan of fictional mystery that arrests my imagination. Visit this blog for more about the best of crime fiction.

REPOST: Laird Hamilton: What I've Learned

I love watersports. But indulging in such activities made me think, “Can I enjoy doing watersports forever?” Good thing, I chanced upon this article on Esquire.Some of the things discussed I can easily relate to. Read on and be enlightened.

Image Source: esquire.com

Just because people are doing extraordinary things doesn't mean they're not ordinary people. 

One of my favorite things to do in the morning is to stand on golf balls and roll them along my arches. You have seventy-four hundred nerve endings on your feet, so you stimulate your whole metabolism when you do that. 

When we first decided to try to ride Jaws,* no one had ever ridden waves that big. Period. So we didn't know if we were going into a black hole never to be seen again. Regardless of how it was perceived from the outside, we operated conservatively within the environment. We always say: Ride to ride another day. We go out there with the attitude that we're going to do it in a way that we can do it again tomorrow. 

Riding a fifty-foot wave for the first time is like the first time you go more than a hundred miles an hour in your car. Afterward, you can't remember what was on the side of the road or if there were even other cars on the road. Once you've driven more than a hundred miles an hour five hundred times, you start to be able to look around. 

When you make a mistake, the ocean gives you an instant reminder. You get punished. If golf clubs could shock you every time you hit the ball wrong, we'd probably learn how to play golf pretty well. 

When I was a kid, the lifeguards would come to my mom's house and say, "Well, Laird's out at sea again." She'd say, "Oh, no, he's inside sleeping." They were like, "No, he's out at sea and we're going to have to go get him again. That's the third time this week." 

When you're little, you ride a one-footer, then a two. Then a ten. It keeps evolving. 

The Genghis Khan warriors used to have a rule that you never talked about injury. The way it translates for me is: Don't train for what you don't want to have happen. It's like this: People say, "Oh, I can hold my breath for five minutes." I say, "I wouldn't be working on that because that might be something that you get tested on." 

Wiping out is an underappreciated skill. Look at any sport that has crashing or falling. Football. Motorbike. There's an art to crashing. If you took a normal person and threw them into that situation, they'd be severely hurt. But the guys who've developed a certain skill at it hop right back up. 

Surfing's one of the few sports that you look ahead to see what's behind. 

First of all, you always try to avoid ever getting down there in the first place. But when you are deep down and getting washed around, you're pulling on all the years of what's happening to you and the skills you've acquired. You're getting rag-dolled and spun around thirty times and you're wondering, Am I near the bottom? Am I near the top? Normally, I close my eyes. Seeing only disorients you and makes you use more oxygen. Sometimes you know that any kind of movement is just a waste of energy. So you totally calm yourself. I open my arms and try to expand out — like a floating leaf. It's a little bit like wrestling somebody four times bigger than you. If he's got you pinned, chances are you should just wait until you feel him let up, and then make your move. But then there are times when you feel you don't have much air, so you just dig down and turn into some sort of sea creature to get to the surface. 

I'm almost forty-seven now. I've never felt stronger, never felt in better shape, never felt more focused, never felt more experienced. There are strong young guys. But there's nothing meaner and more experienced than a fifty-year-old tough guy.
*A huge surfing spot on Maui where waves can reach seventy feet high and travel at speeds up to thirty miles per hour.

I am Zachary Wood, a Tennessee native now living in Orlando, Florida. I am passionate about arresting mystery novels and exciting water activtiies. You can subscribe to my blog for more of my everyday musings.