Last night I watched The Haunting, which was every bit as terrifying as I’d been promised. I wish I’d watched it earlier in the evening, as I found it incredibly unsettling. I also thought it handled the arrival of the doctor’s wife better than in the book. Her reason for being there seems to me to make more sense.
It’s also really clear why the remakes have all failed. Hollywood thinks about horror in one way, this movie thinks about it in another. Plus, could you do those kinds of voice-overs these days? I’m not sure. But the core dynamic would be easy enough to replicate. A Dugger-like girl goes to a slightly less-conservative Christian college and a charismatic professor has a Thanksgiving week excursion to Hill House to investigate paranormal claims. So, it’s her, the somewhat closeted, cool lesbian, and a kind of jocky frat kid, plus the charismatic professor. In other words, draw a line between the heavy religious stuff of the daughter to the heavy religious stuff of the students.
I also listened to the first two episodes of Tanis, the new podcast from The Black Tapes people. Or, perhaps, it’s the same podcast coming from a slightly different angle. I can’t tell yet. But I’m enjoying the fuck out of it. It’s got Jack Parsons and a nod to House of Leaves and, most importantly, a strong consideration of Hard Harry. Pump Up the Volume did terribly at the box office. I can’t say that it became a cult hit. It’s never on repeats on cable. For the most part, it was an utter dud.
For a few of us. So few it apparently doesn’t even count as a cult, that movie was something else. Like, you thought your life was going one way and you saw it and your life couldn’t go that way any more.
It’s because of its non-cult status, its importance, but only to a small, inconsequential group of people, that I laughed when it was mentioned on Tanis. If you want to know what Tanis is about, it’s basically about taking those moments that mean everything to almost no one and asking how something so important could remain hidden. (In this case, I suspect because, if you aren’t a 1990s teenager watching Pump Up the Volume in 1990, it might be a terrible movie, which I will never know because I’m not going to let this asshole 41 year old watch it and nitpick it.)
I’m liking it.
Work continues on Ashland. I envisioned its structure all along like a spiral. But it’s a spiral like those funnels you drop a coin into at the mall. The first part takes long loops, circling but slowly. Then we build up tension. And now we’re just about to the part where the coin slips into the mouth of the funnel and is spinning so tightly you can barely see it.
Tiny Cat Pants 