Notes from the Peninsula
On writing, films and living a creative life
Censor (2021)
Enid Baines is a censor at the British Board of Film Classification. Her parents decide it is time to have her long-missing sister declared dead. Enid’s daily life, the films she has to watch, and memories of her sister, begin to bleed together.
La Llorona (2019)
A former general found guilty of genocide is trapped in his house by protesters, and strange things begin to happen to the family as the ghosts of the past insist on being heard.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Ana, a nurse, wakes up to the start of a zombie apocalypse, and manages to hook up with a police officer, Rhodes, and three other survivors and hide in a nearby shopping mall.
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Night of the Demons (1988)
A disparate group of misfits are tormented by a demon after a seance-like party game on Halloween night. The second half of this film rips.
Saw (2004)
Two men wake up chained by the ankles to radiators on opposite sides of a locked room. There is a dead man between them with his brains blown out, clutching a tape recorder.
Triangle (2009)
Triangle is this year’s first such nugget of gold. It’s about the patterns of thought, feeling and action we find ourselves in, the bad habits we can’t break, especially with the people we love.
The Crazies (1973)
A military developed virus is accidentally released into the water supply of Evans City, Pennsylvania, and the military attempts to impose martial law to contain its spread.
My Bloody Valentine (1981)
A unique film set in a small mining town, with the young male characters mostly miners. It was exciting to see working class characters and locations in a film like this.
The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)
I though The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail would be a giallo, or at least a proto-slasher, but it is far more a crime-thriller. A wife inherits a million dollars and becomes the focus of a killer.
Nosferatu (1922)
The oldest unseen film in my collection. I appreciated the original Dracula and Frankenstein, but they were pretty dry in places. Nosferatu is ten years older again. This did feel like homework.
Salem’s Lot (1979)
Salem’s Lot has a special place in my heart. It was the first scary book I ever read. The film is the two part miniseries I remember from the eighties stitched together.
Nightmare Beach (1989)
The late eighties, Spring break in Florida, and thousands of young people are in bars and cars along the seafront, drinking, sunbathing and having sex. But this is Nightmare Beach.
A Quiet Place (2018)
Krasinski displays a touch of Spielberg in the way he shows the children’s lives, as well as in the adrenaline-inducing set pieces.
The War of the Worlds (1953)
I recently watched the cleak Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds, so I thought I’d go back to the original 1953 adaptation, whose bleakness is softened by the folksy charm of small town America.
The Thing (1982)
A perfect film. A shape-shifting alien picks off the crew of an Antartic research station. Suspicion turns to paranoia, and the remaining humans have stop the alien from taking over the world.
The Thing From Another World (1951)
A report of a crashed aircraft, a remote scientific outpost, a prickly doctor — and an alien whose unique biology threatens humanity.
Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
Horror stretches across many genres, and you can’t always know in advance how horror-y a film is, so with Shadow in the Cloud we are in war-action-horror territory, in that order.
Lisa and the Devil (1973)
One of the lesser-known corners of the Mario Bava-verse. Telly Savalas as the possible devil Leandro is an amusing presence, and if he is not particularly devilish, the dream-like plot definitely is.
The Addiction (1995)
This is a film thick with social commentary, philosophy texts and existential ideas. The first images we see are piles of dead bodies from the Holocaust and Vietnam.
Jakob’s Wife (2021)
The irrepressible Barbara Crampton and Larry Fessenden star in this story of a woman’s mid-life crisis being super-charged by an encounter with a vampire.
Werewolves Within (2021)
To kick off this year’s #31DaysofHorror I chose Werewolves Within, a comedy-whodunnit-horror based on a Ubisoft video game. It sounded like a fun October opener.
Horror AND sex!
Here we go again, with my fourth #31DaysofHorror. I’ve talked about this before, but watching these sorts of films makes me feel like I’m hanging out with my dad. This year I just want a reason to watch a lot of horror films.
Stop rushing
Time isn’t real. The future is an abstraction. So says Alan Watts. I do rush things to get to the end of them — not always, but often enough for it to be a thing I’ve noticed over and over again throughout my life.
A seat in the sun
I’m sitting in the sun. August isn’t going to plan, but I’m doing the best I can with it.
Auguste
The Three Colours trilogy marked my move from July into August, and amusingly the fledgling judge in Red is called Auguste.
Inland Empire
An unusual and meta experience, but after three hours, as the end credits roll, I find I’m crying, because of the joyful music, yes, and because I’m exhausted.
Mulholland Drive
Events organically unfold, the images are striking, the narrative is confusing, characters are not who they seem to be, and in the last twenty minutes he reveals what’s really going on, sort of.
The Straight Story
If David Lynch were trying to somehow redress all the darkness of his earlier films in one go, then he would make The Straight Story.
Lost Highway
Lost Highway is a puzzle. It opens with a jealous husband who thinks his wife is having an affair, and ends with a deadly resolution, but what happens in between is ambiguous and complicated.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
A howl of pain from Laura Palmer, the murdered girl that opened the story of Twin Peaks. It’s difficult, heavy, hard to watch in places, and grapples with incest, rape, drug-taking, murder and domestic abuse.
Wild at Heart
Wild at Heart is a series of deliberately melodramatic, hyper-violent and sexual scenes stitched together into a road movie, with a tenuously-made connection to the Wizard of Oz.
Blue Velvet
Blue Velvet has a fearsome reputation but is also culturally beloved. Dennis Hopper’s over-the-top performance has become iconic, and its themes foreshadow those in the massively popular Twin Peaks.
Dune
I went into Dune thinking I would see something the critics were missing – I mean, how could the director of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man direct a complete dud? – and... it’s so over-the-top, it manages to not be awful.
The Elephant Man
The Elephant Man is as traditional and straightforward as Eraserhead is surreal and obtuse. Both are black and white, and Lynch does use some dream imagery in The Elephant Man, but they’re at opposite end of the narrative spectrum.
Eraserhead
So imaginative and pure and watchable and laugh-out-loud funny, which I didn’t expect at all. A psychosexual puzzle about the horrors of unplanned parenthood, marriage, intimacy, capitalism, poverty, dreams – you can take it any direction you like.
Why read?
It’s been a tough year, and in the tumult of it, I stopped enjoying reading (again). Instead, I watched films, which are just as wonderful, but do a fundamentally different job.
Swimming with David Lynch
Spring arriving has given me a creative kick. April has been pretty meta literature-wise. I’ve been reading about reading, reading about writing, writing about reading and, of course, writing about writing. It’s all good.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
I bought it three years ago in a bookshop sale, in spite of the cover, which honestly put me off reading it for a long time.
It’s Spring
This time of year is always strange. There is a drumbeat of family birthdays, including mine, and the pandemic has heightened the sense of time passing. My mother died at the end of February 2014, so this is seven years, unbelievably, since then.
A flotilla of metaphors
Lying in bed this morning, between the alarm going off and pulling back the duvet, it occurred to me that sentences can capture the high-level aspects of a story as well as the nitty-gritty.