News & Blog

I feel like I’m writing too damn many of these remembrances. Word came yesterday that Richard Matheson died on Sunday at the age of 87. Matheson’s influence on science fiction, fantasy, and horror cannot be overstated. Before Stephen King, who claims him as a major influence, Matheson was the most successful writer working outside literary fiction. But long before I knew about the genius of I Am Legend and Matheson’s copious backlist of novels and short stories, I knew him from his work in film and TV.

Matheson wrote the screenplay to most of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films, including two of my favorites, The Fall of the House of Usher (above) and The Pit and the Pendulum. (My absolute favorite Corman-Poe film, The Masque of the Red Death, was written by Matheson’s friend and contemporary Charles Beaumont.) Matheson was responsible for writing some of the most memorable Twilight Zone episodes of the classic era, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” based on his own short story (below).

Matheson wrote for William Shatner again when he penned the classic Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within,” which you might remember as the one where a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into good and bad versions of himself. He wrote the screenplay for the early Spielberg film Duel, based on another of his stories. He wrote the scripts for The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler for producer Dan Curtis, two TV movies that launched the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV series. He would work with Curtis again soon after on the classic TV film Trilogy of Terror, best remembered today for the segment where Karen Black is chased around her apartment by a living Zuni fetish doll. And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the extent of Matheson’s filmed entertainment that reached me as a Monster Kid and stayed with me to this day. I’m hardly alone in that. In fact, Matheson’s reach was so long that a recent Family Guy episode was inspired by his story “The Splendid Source.”

But for me, reading I Am Legend was a seminal turning point in my career as both a reader and a writer. Its impact on me was as strong and lasting as Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and David Martin’s Tap, Tap. The world lost one of its greatest talents this weekend. Rest in peace, Richard Matheson. I hope your work is remembered for generations to come. It deserves to be.

The great Ray Harryhausen passed away Tuesday. He was 92.

I have a lifetime’s worth of fond memories of his work in stop-motion animation: Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad trilogy, Clash of the Titans, Mysterious Island, and so many more. He meant the world to me before I even knew his name. I have a feeling it was that way for lots of Monster Kids, who only learned who Harryhausen was years — maybe even decades — after his films had already burned themselves indelibly into their minds.

I loved the sense of awe and wonder that emanated from his best work: Talos the living statue from Jason and the Argonauts, the cyclops vs. dragon fight in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth, Medusa in Clash of the Titans, Joe in Mighty Joe Young, the enormous cephalopod in Mysterious Island, the centaur vs. griffin fight in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. God, I could keep listing things until dawn. Everything he created was magic.

The Sinbad movies were my favorite of his oeuvre. (One of my earliest moviegoing memories is of seeing 7th Voyage during an early-1970s re-release at a New York City movie theater with my grandmother and brother. I cried when it was time to leave, because I didn’t want the experience to end.) The Sinbad movies launched a thousand daydreams of my own adventures with magic and monsters, and set me on the path to becoming the writer I am today — a job where I’m allowed to continue those same daydreams. So thank you, Ray Harryhausen, for everything you gave us. They just don’t make movies like yours anymore, and I think we’re all the poorer for it.

You can, I think, forgive me for being Hannibal Lectered out since the late ’90s and early ’00s. You see, I’m a huge fan of the films Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs. I think Red Dragon, the novel on which Manhunter is based, is one of the greatest procedural thrillers ever written. Its semi-sequel, Silence, ain’t bad as a book, either. As the author responsible for them both, Thomas Harris created one of the greatest modern villains in literary and cinematic history in Hannibal Lecter, and Anthony Hopkins was a freaking revelation in the role in the 1991 film adaptation of Silence.

But after that, things went off the rails. In 1999, Harris published Hannibal, a direct sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Wildly excited for it, I bought the novel in hardcover the day it was released, too early even to get it with a bestseller’s discount. I paid full hardcover price for it. The novel started brilliantly with lushly written, Grand Guignol scenes of Hannibal Lecter in Italy, but soon devolved into a rushed, bare-bones screenplay outline. (Seriously, some of the descriptions in this third-person POV novel even begin with sentences like “We first see the house from outside, then push slowly toward it…” just like in screenplays.) The novel is a mess. The ending isn’t even worth talking about, unless you enjoy it when an author essentially gives his readers the finger for having the nerve to like his work. This novel, too, was turned into a film, and it was almost as bad as the book. Changing the ending, it turned out, wasn’t enough to save it. No wonder Jodie Foster refused to reprise the role of Clarice Starling for it. (Julianne Moore does her best, but no.)

But that wasn’t all. No, the slow degradation of all things Hannibal Lecter continued unabated. In 2002, Red Dragon was needlessly remade as a film for the sole reason of allowing Anthony Hopkins to play Lecter again. (It was Brian Cox who originated the role in Manhunter.) This remake had none of the style of Manhunter, and none of the creepiness of The Silence of the Lambs. It was an exercise in money counting and little else. But it did well, which meant there was even more money to be made, and so Harris published Hannibal Rising in 2005, exploring in detail Lecter’s backstory and all the things that made him like he is, and thereby destroying the last remaining interesting thing about him. I didn’t bother reading it, or seeing the film adaptation with Gaspard Ulliel as a younger Hannibal. I just wasn’t interested anymore. By then, I was truly Hannibal Lectered out.

So you can imagine how shocked I was that I actually really, really liked the pilot episode of Hannibal, the new, if not terribly originally named, prequel series on NBC. Focusing on the uneasy, early-days partnership between FBI special agent Will Graham and official consulting psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, the episode is directed with flourish in a style reminiscent of Manhunter (although instead of relying on “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” they instead make use of some of the musical effects from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon). Hugh Dancy is the best Will Graham since William Peterson in Manhunter (sorry, Edward Norton), playing him as slightly autistic and deeply troubled. His ability to imagine himself not just at the scene of the crime but also in the killer’s shoes is as shocking to him as it is, often, to the viewer as we watch our hero stab or shoot someone to death during these brief interludes. (On the other hand, the weird, glowing pendulum swipe at the start of these interludes is unnecessary and distracting. We get it, it’s not really happening. You don’t need to talk down to us.) Also, Laurence Fishburne does a great job as Jack Crawford, which makes me wonder why he was let go from a similar role on CSI. Ah well, their loss is Hannibal‘s gain. He’s almost as good in the role as Scott Glenn was in Silence.

But of course the success of every Hannibal Lecter story relies on Lecter himself. Here, the role falls to Casino Royale‘s Mads Mikkelsen, and he does a pretty good job. It would be tough to top Anthony Hopkins, and it would be just as tough to mimic his performance, so Mikkelsen doesn’t bother. He brings his own brand of cold aloofness to the role, and judging solely from the first episode, it works. I just wish he would tone down the accent. I don’t know how much of it is his own, natural Danish accent and how much is his interpretation of Lecter’s European childhood, but I thought it was thick enough that it got in the way of some of his line readings and would definitely prefer something a bit more subtle.

Color me impressed not only that I’m no longer as Hannibal Lectered out as I thought but I’m actually interested in a prequel TV series where I thought none was necessary. I suppose it’s because there’s more fertile ground to be tilled here than in, say, A&E’s new prequel series Bates Motel, which doesn’t interest me in the least. While Psycho definitely does not need its backstory filled in, there’s a tantalizing blank slate to Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter’s brief partnership before Graham eventually discovered what Lecter was and put him away. They can do almost anything with this series, go almost anywhere, and in the midst of it they can explore the psyches of two of commercial fiction’s most interesting characters. I’m happy to take the journey with them.

I’m writing too many remembrances these days. I suppose it’s a natural part of growing older — the people who were part of your life start to go away. It’s one thing when it’s someone you know, like Rick Hautala.  It’s another, stranger but no less affecting thing when it’s someone you didn’t know personally but who was such a big part of your formative years that you almost feel like he’s part of your family. And that, to me, was Roger Ebert, who passed away yesterday at the age of 70.

There are no words to express what Siskel and Ebert At the Movies meant to me. I watched it regularly since it began airing in syndication in New York City in the mid-1980s. I watched it well into my adulthood. Hell, I would tape the damn thing with my VCR if I wasn’t home to watch it. Together, I let them into my home every weekend and listened to what they had to say about the movies coming out that week. I liked them. I respected their opinions. And even when I disagreed with their criticisms of movies I loved, I knew those criticisms were often valid ones.

When Gene Siskel was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1998, Ebert tried to keep the show going. Siskel would call in from his home or hospital bed to share his thoughts on that week’s films — one time, famously, while flying so high on pain killers that Ebert could only laugh and shake his head at the non-sequitors coming out of his absent friend’s mouth. When Siskel died in 1999, Ebert refused to let the show die, too. He auditioned, on air, a rotating cast of fellow film critics to take Siskel’s place — including, weirdly, Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, who proved he’s much better behind the keyboard than in front of the camera. Finally, Ebert chose Richard Roeper, a fellow Chicago film critic, and the show became Ebert and Roeper and the Movies. Roger Ebert, after nearly twenty years, finally got his name first on the marquee.

I never warmed to Roeper the way I did to Siskel. When Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands, and chin, and couldn’t talk anymore, Roeper soldiered on with his own rotating cast of co-hosts — including, weirdly, John Mellencamp, who refused to say a bad word about any film they reviewed that week. He was just happy the filmmakers and actors were trying so darn hard to entertain everyone. Roeper looked exasperated. Mellencamp never returned. Neither did Ebert. I eventually stopped watching. It just wasn’t the same.

One of the amazing things I’ve discovered about Roger Ebert from his various obituaries is what a lover of science fiction he was. Not just sf movies, but literature,too. According to Locus Online:

[Ebert] published two SF stories: “After the Last Mass” in Fantastic (1972) and “In Dying Venice” in Amazing (1972). As a teenager he was an active SF fan, contributing letters of comment to various magazines and writing poems for Pat & Dick Lupoff’s Xero in the early ’60s; he also wrote the introduction for The Best of Xero (2004). He was friendly with fans, authors, and editors, including Wilson “Bob” Tucker and Ed Gorman, and published his own fanzine, Stymie.

His own fanzine! Holy crap! And of course, Ebert became a fixture on Twitter in the past few years, becoming probably the most re-tweeted personality in the social website’s history.

His recent memoir, Life Itself, currently sits in my Kindle, still unread since its purchase a year and a half ago. I think I’m going to rectify that shortly.

I doubt there will ever again be two film critics so well known, so beloved, and so influential as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. And now they’re both gone. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be proved wrong. Maybe one day there will be a new movie review program, probably online, that will capture the nation’s attention the way theirs did. But until then, the balcony is closed.