After not one, not two, not three, but four three-hour epics spanning a decade of production, Peter Jackson revisits his Heavenly Creatures phase. This looks real good.

The man’s a hard worker, and while some knocked King Kong for being shallow, I thought it was a well-directed adventure, which is saying a lot for a genre overstuffed with mediocrity. The poor guy must’ve starved himself skinny and spurted out gray hair directing and perfecting, evidence the man is a slave to his passions. Here, just look at this picture:

I never cared for the first two installments of Lord of the Rings: sub-par screenwriting and editing stretched to three hour length. Then he did The Return of the King, and then King Kong. Regardless of your opinion of those films, the man’s direction improved. With his adaptation of Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”, it could be that those four epics were really just practice, and now we’re about to see the real Peter Jackson, the one who put himself on hold since finishing “Heavenly Creatures.”

“Well that’s preposterous!” you say. But look at Guillermo del Toro. He made “Chronos,” an original vision, then hit his stride with mainstream entertainments like “Hellboy” and “Blade II.” Then he surprised everyone with his Arthur Machen-esque “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Quite a parallel, I think. Both directors seem to share the notion that horror and fantasy are alike; that there’s real beauty to be found in the ugliest of places…if only we could be bothered to be courageous and embrace it like their protagonists.

I expected a passable war film. What I got was, in the words of Joe Hill’s tweet, “a cool-blooded character study.” Oh, The Hurt Locker can be an action flick if you’d like—though the ‘action’ is a necessary byproduct of its subject matter. If things blow up and people get shot, it’s not because John McClain is on the loose. There are no bad guys.

Instead, these are faceless killers who want to do very awful things to people. Like blow them up. The film doesn’t try to weave an escalating plot. It sidesteps formula for a more human touch: it is a patchwork of fearsome missions designed to test their resolve. Jeremy Renner as the man in the bomb suit takes center stage as the cool blooded risk taker. As in Scorsese’s nearly plotless “Bringing Out the Dead”, it is enough that he do his miserable job, while the “why” of why he does it is slowly revealed.

Revealed, but never explained. Every moment in The Hurt Locker is an exercise in understated pathos. Detail is treated with such direct crystal clarity, we may be forgiven if we don’t notice them.

This is punctuated in the movie’s final moments, a sudden departure from the ruins of Iraq and into civilian life in the States. To those who question the restlessly shaky camera, and why the editing is the way it is, the scenes in America provide an explanatory antithesis to the queasy style. The poetic final shot, with its man in a bomb suit walking down a deserted alleyway, is elliptical in how it evokes the very first scene.

This is a good “war movie”, but an even greater character study and technical marvel if you know where to look. Mark my words, friend, this is genuine Oscar bait.

So Sean and I shot another actor reel. Location was the actor’s workshop, in RJ’s office. Setup time: twenty minutes. It ain’t gonna top Nascar, but that’s fast enough. Shots turned out fine. We didn’t prefer the utterly ordinary white wall, but what were we to do?

Because the actors were good at what they did (memorizing four pages of the script I wrote), we wrapped photography in ten minutes shy of an hour. Which was great; because the light pouring through the window was our key light. Any longer and the sun would’ve gone down several shades too low, a no-no regarding continuity.

Two nights ago, the four of us got together and shot my itty bitty skit in a parking lot I. Remember when I blogged that I wanted to shoot a “practice skit,” you know, to get my hands dirty? This was it.

Er, I wrote it the night before we shot. Bad idea. Remember: stories are never written, they are rewritten. Mine had the germ of a story, yet it hadn’t germinated. Despite this, Jaemin and Mike waded through the murkiness and emerged as solid actors. They’re amateurs and likely don’t give a damn about being the next John Cho; but in the thirty takes I pieced together in Premiere, they’re very competent. Not fantastic, mind you. But they’re much better than they think.

The skit itself is…proficient. I’m not gonna say it’s good, because it isn’t; but it is proficient. We lit the interior of the Scion with three battery operated LEDs I got at Target; wrapped them in an orange gel. The exposure was great at 1200 ISO, and the lights matched the background. It seems like it’s coming from a nearby street lamp, and that is precisely the effect we set out to achieve.

In other news, we completed the new layout for Take Zer0 3.0. Sean tells me he just sent out the .psd to our coder to be coded.

Ugh, still trying to churn out this short script; the fifth one I’ve written in the past three weeks (only two of them are decent). Here’s the deal: I want an easy dialog piece. No artifice, no heavy exposition. Just simple conversation between souls. Inside a car. That’s it.

Because I like bothering Sean, I drove the thirty miles to his house and tested the camera in a place I had picked out, a parking lot. Sean had to park at a certain distance and at a peculiar angle from the two street lamps, each of a different color temperature. Then I busted out a twenty-dollar portable LED lamp and wrapped it with a gel. There’s a tiny bit of extra light from a fluorescent I placed in the backseat.

For the ten minutes it took us, the resulting shot isn’t too awful. There’s a Wong Kar-Wai meets Michael Mann vibe to it. And yet, before I pat myself on the head, it needs plenty more coordination. That nasty shadow on his neck could be flagged out of the way. I’ll likely buy another LED to provide more fill. I believe the ISO is at 1600.

To paraphrase Mr. Lovecraft, “Fear is the strongest emotion.”

The following shorts fall under the banner of this disreputable genre, bound by common ground: to instill in you that most universal feeling. No, I don’t speak of love. If they are not all directly frightening tales, remember that fear is not to be confused with terror. The latter wants only one thing. While fear can indeed frighten, it can also inspire awe, wonder, and a powerful sense of mystery.

To the uninitiated, this roundup is the second installment to P.D. Horror Stories Roundup #1. Unlike that one, the stories here are shorter overall, with more variety in tone and style. And if you’re reading this at night, I really, really suggest you watch this skit to set the mood! It’s an amusing three-minute cartoon; but Annable is a superb storyboardist, and “The Hidden People” slowly builds suspense.

All stories are linked to their text-in-full. I recommend you read them without eyestrain; thus, copy and paste the stories from your browser window and into a free application like Dark Room. If you have an iPhone or something similar, Stanza is another free alternative. **Some of the below texts may require you to copy and paste.

Mysterious Disappearances by Ambrose Bierce (1893)

Mr. Bierce, writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, here discloses three allegedly true vignettes, all to do with the horror of the vanishing act: people who spontaneously disappear without a trace, right before the eyes of their loved ones. Included is an article outlining the theory put forth by Dr. Hem, that there exists a “space between spaces.”

The prose of Ambrose Bierce, best known for An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, has been cited as too choppy when compared to his counterparts “across the pond,” yet so dry and matter-of-fact that no one has ever cared. His topics touch on the supernatural as much as they do with factual reports; and to our heightened fascination, this flavors his stories with a hint of the very real.

The Woman in the Snow adapted by Lafcadio Hearn (1904)

In a deserted hut in the middle of the night, a young woodcutter awakens to see an eerie ‘woman of the snow.’ She makes him promise not to tell anyone he has seen her, else she will return to suck the life out of him. Years pass, and he forgets his promise…

Memorable tales are often the simplest, and here no time is wasted delivering the punchline. Modeled after a Buddhist fable, this is so tightly structured to be one of the popular ‘Kaidan’ adaptations; among others, it even inspired an episode of Tales from the Crypt.

The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson (1907)

Upon hearing cries for help, a ship’s crew encounters a small boat at sea. Its unseen occupant is unwilling to board and shuns from the light of their lanterns. From there they are told the strange tale of a nearby uncharted island, where there lies a bizarre landscape.

The unusual concept borders on sci-fi, yet the framework is horror. While not directly frightening, it instead bears the qualities of a subtle, well-remembered nightmare. Hodgson is more fascinated by horror than he is frightened by it; and this fascination elevates his work into territory rarely trodden. This popular piece has been adapted several times into film and television.

Thurnley Abbey by Perceval Landon (1908)

On a hill sits Thurnley Abbey, a reputedly haunted mansion. That doesn’t bother Colvin’s friend, who is about to marry and plans to inherit the place. The old friends get to talking about ghosts, whereupon Colvin jokes, “If one were to see a ghost, one ought to speak to it.”

Told at a leisurely pace, this tale concerns the passage of time and the role it plays in sticking to our word. Or maybe that’s just pretense. Unlike a typical haunted house story, nothing out of the ordinary actually happens in Thurnley Abbey. At least until the time comes.

The Toll House by W.W. Jacobs (1909)

A handful of friends who disbelieve in the supernatural decide to stay overnight in the Toll House, a place fraught with peculiar history: its occupants are always discovered dead the morning after.

Lesser known than his masterwork “The Monkey’s Paw,” this short is no less ingeniously plotted and still holds up a century later. No spectral sightings here. The mystery of the Toll House lies within the weary framework of the human mind. A refreshing perspective to the often stale genre of haunted houses.

Facts Concerning the Late Aurthur Jermyn… by H.P. Lovecraft (1920)

Aurthur Jermyn was an intelligent young man of good standing. So it came with surprise to those who knew him that he doused himself in oil and set himself ablaze. Thus, compiled for your perusal, here we have the facts concerning the late Aurthur Jermyn, and the queer reasons why he chose oblivion.

Lovecraft’s non-Mythos stories were either lightweight mood pieces or heavyweight pulps. This refined piece, a standalone tale, is verbosely economical, with subject matter that’s pleasantly pulp-ish. Even better, he manages to tell a bizarre story in such a spare amount of time.

The Horror from the Mound by Robert E. Howard (1932)

A farmer sees that his neighbor will encircle a large mound rather than cross over it. He tells the farmer an oral history of the dirt mound, which had its origins with the Spanish conquistadors and is now considered a bad omen. That night, convinced of buried treasure, and unbeknown to the neighbor, the farmer begins to dig.

When he wasn’t writing stories to meet a deadline—or maybe because he was trying to meet a deadline—Howard had pacing in spades. Here, he tells an efficient tale of pure inevitability: what will happen is inevitable, predictable even, and breathlessly we expect it. Not for a second is that an understatement.

The Return by Fernando Sorrentino (2001?)

Through his window, a teacher witnesses a bizarre murder. Years later, he is witness to yet another strange event; one that bares an eerie correlation to the previous.

Horror could do with more surrealism; after all, to witness a perceived supernatural event is downright strange. This short-short is as light as a fable, but the plot unfurls with such a dose of magical realism that, well, who knew horror could be so…elliptical?

Oh, there’s plenty of crap to clog the drain. The awful stories, the dull stories, the stories in bad taste—they stagnate in cliches. It takes a great storyteller to tell a story about ghosts, because everybody knows all the good ones have been told.

Allow me to summarize what I read from an EC rag. I believe it was an issue of Tales from the Crypt. Now, this is straight from my memory, and so for those who know the tale, forgive any lapses in my telling.

It opens in the early 1900s with a young woman and her grandmother. There is talk about a certain young man, and the girl is commanded by her heartless grandmother never to see him again. The girl sneaks out and attempts to see her lover. But it’s raining out—pouring—and she succumbs to pneumonia. Days pass. The poor young woman dies; not from being out in the rain, the narrator supposes, but from a broken heart.

Her lover is mortified. He is forbidden by the cruel grandmother to attend her funeral, where she is to be sealed in a mausoleum, not buried. Acting upon this detail, that night the young man ventures into her mausoleum to say his farewells. To his luck, he finds the heavy doors to the crypt open. Inside, he sees his beautiful lover in repose, and spends the night whispering sweet nothings by her open coffin. As he turns to leave, a gust of wind kicks up and the giant doors seal shut. Horrified, he attempts to pry them loose. Then he bangs on them with his fist. Nothing works. He is trapped.

Weeks pass.

Nearby custodians wise up to the noises coming from the mausoleum and unlock the doors. They discover the young man, still alive, but terribly shaken and emotionally disturbed. It turns out that in his tortuous ordeal, he survived by drinking water from morning dews. Eventually he grew hungry, ravenously hungry and, well, he had to nibble on something…

What a horrible story! Very awful and disgusting. And very good. My point is that it could have been lifted from another story, “ripped off” so to speak (EC writers were known to borrow from classic works). But it hardly matters. This is a fine story because of how deliberately it is told.

Remember this: all bad horror stories are uninspired knockoffs. Good ones are merely inspired. So until next time, I hope you all enjoy these stories as much as I did!