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“Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe” – So. That Happened.

It isn’t that I disliked this Christmas special.

It’s just that it wasn’t A Christmas Carol.

Spoilers are quite possibly lurking herein.

And I know, I know, I know, that’s not fair of me and I agree with you — it isn’t fair at all. I wish I liked it more — I wanted to like it more!

But Carol was so outstanding and this was so…not.

It was a clever conceit for which I had serious hope at points — the nursery, the trees growing ornaments, the Green Man and Green Lady — and it never rose to the hope which I had for it and, by the end, it fell well below, sadly.

It wasn’t frightening, it wasn’t sweet, it wasn’t transformation, it was just…all right.

I have to say, the outstanding moment for me was the identification of the planet as Androzani because motherfucking  hello?! That was seriously cool and I was totally down with that.

The ending with Amy and Rory, too, was beyond sweet. That was lovely — a wonderful character-building moment for all three that made a beautiful cap to the mid-season.

The rest of the special? Well. Meh?

World War II nostalgia? check.

Heroic father figure? check. (He’s even a fighter pilot.)

Charming, idiosyncratic children? check. (One of them even wears thick glasses.)

Heroic, self-sacrificing, adoring mother who wants nothing more than to see her family reunited? check. Disgustingly enough.

It was all rather pat. Even with the introduction of the Green Man and Green Lady — genuinely terrifying characters in their native mythologies — was turned into a vehicle to make the mother more of a heroic mother. Hindsight being what it is, of course this special now looks like the bleedingly obvious segue into the Amy/River/Madame Kevarian storyline that it so obviously is, but viewed as a standalone it’s just kind of…predictable. It isn’t even a particularly helpful segue because, well, we’ve gone there already! A Good Man Goes To War took us there quite nicely and then booted our asses up, down, around, and over for awhile. After that…well, Wardrobe just doesn’t really have the chops.

There’s no moment of transformation here, no moment of wonder or pain or beauty akin to anything in the Carol or even in the regular season episodes. It’s all very watchable, very charming Who but it lacks that step beyond that Moffat and Davies before him have done such a good job of reaching for.

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Horror Movie Homework: What Sound Does Fear Make?

When I first saw 30 Days of Night (in the theatre when it first came out in 2007), I really wasn’t into it. I told a friend later I felt I should’ve worn a splatterguard and a butcher’s apron — one of those big, head-to-toe jobs.

And then, for some reason, when it became available on Netflix, I thought, “Ah, what the hell,” and watched it again.

And loved it.

I’ve watched it a number of times since then and inflicted it on plenty of other people, including my wife and my father.

Recently, I came across a cheap copy of 30 Days of Night: Dark Days. I remember this being a direct-to-video release that came out relatively soon after the original movie. Obviously, the original cast members — those surviving, anyway — caught the smell of a loser before I did because there is not a single original survivor character — vamp or human — in the sequel.

Dark Days is really quite terrible in a number of ways but that’s not quite what I want to write about today. (Don’t worry — there’s another blog post about the terribleness coming.)

Instead, I want to write about a couple of the things that made the first movie so terrifying — both in the theatre and when I watched it later, in the safety and comfort of my apartment, cozily tucked up on my futon — and they’re things that the sequel lost, much to its detriment.

In the original movie, as those of you who have seen it doubtless remember, the vampires don’t speak English. They communicate through speech but they’re not comprehensible without subtitles. They’re not like Buffy vamps or Underworld vamps or Supernatural vamps or True Blood vamps or Anita Blake vamps or, god help us, Meyer vamps (typing that leaves a real bad taste in the mouth, let me tell you) — they’re a completely ‘other’ force and that comes through most clearly, for me anyway, in their shrieking, screeching, nails-on-a-blackboard, record-scratching language.

It’s not that they don’t talk or communicate or have a common language; they do, quite obviously, and even their servants (“blood junkies” or “blood bonded” in other universes if you’re not familiar with 30 Days…) understand it. There’s even a fascinating suggestion that a woman driven nearly to the end of her rope by blood loss and fear, used by the vampires as drag bait to bring out other humans hiding in the town, can almost understand what is being said to her before she’s killed.

Along with the weird, bird-like body language adapted to a greater or lesser extent by all the vampire performers, the non-language language is incredibly effective at making the vampires frightening, unhuman, inhuman, other. They’re only comprehensible to each other and what they say — as given to us by the subtitles — is made more difficult by the fact that we’re being given it translated. Knowing what they’re saying doesn’t serve to make them comprehensible or open up their story, making their devastating attack somehow understandable. Instead, the sound and the content underline the fact of their otherness, distancing them from the population they’re attacking. It isn’t that they don’t understand the humans; it’s that the humans — and by extension, the audience — are incapable of understanding them.

The human who does understand them — their blood junkie who precedes them into the town and does some preliminary destruction to isolate the community – is about as far gone as you can get and still be putting one foot down in front of the other. It’s a wonderful acting job by Ben Foster who manages to make the man terrifying and cringing and horrible all at once. He’s gone in another, terrible world of his own, completely removed from the humans around him who should be his natural allies against this force of nature with which he has ranged himself instead. Whatever he’s seeing, whatever world he’s moving through, is largely of his own creation and inside his own head and it is a motherfucking dark place. If anyone ever wants to do another 30 Days… movie, I’d suggest this guy’s story.

The sound of the vampire language is, I think, as key to their scare factor as the sounds made by the Predator (stolen quite effectively by a nifty little haunted house story called 100 Ghost Street). The popping, clicking, rattling, and snapping noises of the Predator are completely other. They’re akin to animal noises — or even the noises often attributed to Triffids in film versions of John Wyndham’s great dark novel. But they don’t make sense. They aren’t a code we can decipher. We can only listen for them and, as the story unfolds, learn to be afraid when we hear them.

The vampire language in 30 Days… is very similar. The shrieking screams are hideous to listen to just on aesthetic grounds: they’re not pleasing to the ear; they sound like the screams of a hawk or fox in full cry after prey and they have a similar effect in lifting the hairs on the backs of our necks and making us flush cold. There’s something in the range and tone of them that taps straight into an adrenal response because it reminds us we’re meat.

These vamps aren’t human.

If they ever were human it was a long time ago and we’re not going to be able to bring it back to them with pleading or argument and win ourselves pity or sympathy or even a headstart.

These are not philosophically nihilistic coffee-shop lurkers or goth kids on a spree or politically disaffected guerrillas with a mission. These are killers — they’re not mindless, not unorganized, not disconnected from each other, not unattached to each other. But they’re not attached to us except inasmuch as they need us to stay alive.

Dark Days has completely forgotten this. Its vamps speak English (bar one who is the least impressive vampire queen I think I’ve ever seen) and have lost their weirdly acrobatic body language. Instead, they’re more akin to Blade II-style vamps with a punk aesthetic and aggression rather than post-apocalyptic grunge and predatory instinct. It’s an entirely disappointing step in what starts out in 30 Days… as a promisingly rich and powerful, if bleak and lonely, world.

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Want to Have a Happy Mid-week?

Notice I do not say Middle-earth or MidWorld or Midgard because…well, I can only do so much here.

But if you want to have a happier mid-week right now this minute, then head over to Tiptoe’s WAFF-a-thon fic fest!

You can do the prompty thing, like these good folks:

tiptoe #1

Or you can answer prompts, like-a-da-so:

tiptoe #2

Or you can get really wild ‘n crazy and do both. :) And you don’t need a LiveJournal account to do it: you can use Facebook, Twitter, Open ID, Google, Mail.ru, or VKontakte. I’m gonna be honest here and say those last two mean nothing to me but I assume that if you need to know what they are, you know.

And you can keep track of all the fluffy goodness right here on this convenient fic index post that Our Lady of WAFF has made up.

So go forth and be warm ‘n fluffy (or fuzzy, either one works)!

You know you love it when they laugh. ;)

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WAFF-a-thon 2013

Because I gots nothin’ by way of a good Horror Movie Homework blog post — or anything else for today — I have ceded this space to the ever-lovely Tiptoe for the good of the world.

No, really.

Just keep reading….

Welcome, everyone, to the fifth annual WAFFathon, making the Internet a little happier. The premise behind the WAFFathon is simple: Fandom is great, but let’s face it, it can get pretty dark around here at times. Not to mention that it rains absolute CRAP on the characters we most love. So to make their not-quite-canon lives a little better, and to increase the per-capita volume of Warm and Fuzzy Feelings (WAFF for short) on these here intertubes, the WAFFathon has arrived!

How to Play:

  • 1) Comment with a fandom and a prompt. Your prompt can be specific, general, vague, cryptic, silly, goofy, OOC, AU, sexy, anything you like, so long as it brings a little sunshine in the end.
  • 2) Find a prompt you like and make something fluffy and feel-goody out of it. Fanfic, fanart, manips, icons, vids, gifs, fanmixes, motis and macros, and anything else creative are all welcome. Adult content is also welcome, but remember that the goal is to be WAFFy!
  • 3) Post it (or a link to it) in the comments.
  • 4) Watch people’s lives light up!

The Rules:

  • 1) Provide lots of encouragement to the creators. Feedback. Compliment. Hug. Friend. Mem. Rec. It’s good karma.
  • 2) This meme will be very lightly policed, but policed it will be. So behave. No trashing of others, fandoms, ships, chars, stories, or the meme writ large will be tolerated. Friendly concrit or suggestions are fine, but keep in mind that we are trying to make people happy, not insecure. As your Moddess Goddess(TM), I reserve the right to do what I feel I need to do. Which I hope will be nothing, but which you are hereby forewarned can change depending on my very mercurial mood. So… like I said. Behave.
  • 3) I have no end date in sight for this meme, but I suggest keeping it a weeklong activity.
  • 4) You are more than welcome to crosspost your creative works wherever you like. It should go without saying that taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own elsewhere is unacceptable by any definition. I refer folks to stop_plagiarism as a good place to follow up on any problems that might occur.

Make the world even happier!

A couple of extra things you can do if you want to make everyone happier:

  • 1) Readers/viewers: If you find an author/creative person you like, go back through their other works and comment on them, or rec their works on your journal. Creative people love feedback and it’s especially gratifying when you get feedback on something you thought was lost to time and when someone likes your work enough to recommend it to his or her friends.
  • 2) Creators: be sure to thank readers for their time and energy spent on your work. Friend them if they’ve friended you or recced you. One of the great things about fan-creative communities is the proximity you can have to the people you admire and respect. We don’t get to have conversations with Joss and Kripke and the rest, but we can talk to each other and that’s even cooler.
  • 3) Pimp this meme to any friends or communities you think would be interested. You can find banners and code at the Banner Thread. Hotlink your little hearts out!

And we may also revisit her for the good of the world on Wednesday. :)