Tag Archives: Halloween

Shitty Sequels III: Cash Cows Forever

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Take me down to the sequel city where the grass is green but the films are shitty…

…and I keep watching them like a dick.

Previously – here and here to be specific – we looked at an array of cruddy slasher movie follow-ups over the years. There will always be sequels and some sequels will always be shitty. Hence, round three…

Ripper 2: Letters from Within (2004)

The original Ripper movie in 2001 was divisive enough but I liked it quite a bit. Sure, it’s as flawed as any other collegiate body count film of its era you care to dip-check, but when compared to this truly dreadful sequel, it’s practically Halloween.

Retconning much of the foundations laid by the first one – a lot of which was never fully resolved anyway – carry-over character Molly (now played by Eric Karpluk) is packed off to a European castle for some deep dream therapy and some cloaked-hulk is somehow awakened by these experiments and offs her fellow nubile residents.

Whether this character is supposed to be some incarnation of Jack the Ripper is another question for the blackboard and the only certainty in the whole project is that the film sucks.

A friend of mine auditioned for a small role (one which I could never identify in the finished product) and, to date, it doesn’t seem to have reached distribution in the UK almost a decade after it was made.

Jason X (2001)

I, for one, don’t actually mind this deca-sequel, but it’s clearly crap.

Produced somewhere between 1999 and its long-delayed release, the idea of ‘Jason in space’ might have seemed funny but once it finally got out there, it was clear nobody got the joke and it’s the only film in the whole Friday the 13th canon to have not even broken even at the US box office.

A combination of timing and content is to blame (what else is there?): Scream and the cycle of big-studio slasher films was already over and out by the time the release date for JX crawled around (I remember Valentine and D-Tox (another delayed one) were released earlier in the year to negative reviews) people were sick of slasher movies all over again and poor ol’ Jay barely got a look in.

Otherwise, the film is neither funny enough nor scary enough, seemingly a recurrent theme in writer Todd Farmer’s horror scripts.

Thankfully, he would get another shot two years later battling Freddy Krueger, a film where, in box office terms, they got most things right.

Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman (2001)

No, not a sequel to that schmaltzy Michael Keaton snowman comedy, but to a B-movie of the same name featuring a serial killer who, after getting into an accident with a truck carrying various chemicals, becomes a murderous snowman and takes revenge on the small town where he was captured.

Full of goofy dialogue and sub-Chucky one-liners, the film is amusing enough on a make-fun-if-it level (tagline: “He’s chillin’ and killin'”). This follow up, however, is the as much fun as a sudden attack of diarrhoea in a traffic jam.

Relocating to a tropical island (!?), the titular snowman follows returning actor Chris Allport (also seen in Savage Weekend way back in ’76) and wife on holiday to kill various schmucks. A Tremors sequel-like life cycle element sees small fluffy balls representing baby-Jack Frosts highlights how cheap and rubbish things have become. Ideas about a possible Jack Frost 3 have, thankfully, melted away.

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1992)

I really like Maniac Cop. Tom Atkins! Bruce Campbell is a straight role! Fast paced and high body counted – it’s a great little 80s flick. Maniac Cop 2 carried over the surviving characters and was entertaining enough. The third film though… shoulda been called Bride of Maniac Cop.

Big-faced Robert Z’Dar respectably returns to the role of undead zombie cop Matt Cordell once more after some religious nut resurrects him for no apparent reason. He falls in love with a devoted girl-cop, who has been set up by the media as a Cordell-like super villain. His resolve? To kill! kill! kill! them all!

While more in the slasher mold than MC2, this is one of those explicit cash-in productions that exists for almost no reason. But it’s still better than Jack Frost 2. And Ripper 2.

AND ANOTHER SHITTY SEQUEL I LOVE:

Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

I’m sorry. Really, I am. What can I say? I enjoy it.

Killing Jamie Lee Curtis aside. Busta Rhymes inept acting aside. Tyra Banks thankless and wasted cameo aside. Most ridiculous un-doing of previous movie’s finale ever seen on film aside. I still enjoy Resurrection.

In the ‘for’ column – slim-pickings though they are – there’s a good cast outside of Rhymes. Katee Sachoff in a pre-Battlestar Gallactica appearance; the adorable Sean Patrick Thomas; American Pie player Thomas Ian Nicholas; Alicia Witt-lite Daisy McCrackin from cruddy DVD flick A Crack in the Floor.

The zeitgeist reality TV plot prevents the film from aging well and if that could’ve been removed as an obstacle this might have worked better as an earlier sequel, say between number six and H20. There was internet chatter about what was going to be Halloween 9 (before mainstay Moustapha Akkad was killed in a terrorist attack) might include the revelation that final girl Sara (Bianca Kajlich – what happened to her?) turning out to be Jamie Lloyd! Could’ve been a good way of undoing some of the hurt H20 caused when it pretended the interim films never happened.

All in all, it sucks as a Halloween film, but it’s an enjoyable, well made slasher movie beyond that.

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Morning gory

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KILL KEITH

2 Stars  2011/15/90m

“Saw meets Richard & Judy.”

Director: Andy Thompson / Writers: Thompson, Tim Major & Pete Benson / Cast: Marc Pickering, Susannah Fielding, David Easter, Keith Chegwin, Joe Pasquale, Tony Blackburn, Russell Grant, Simon Phillips, Joe Tracini, Stephen Chance.

Body Count: 5

Dire-logue: “I shall be introducing a new man into the Crack of Dawn – it’s a big hole to fill.”

Put simply, if you’re not British, you won’t understand a damn thing that’s going on in this comic slasher film that starts off as a funny send-up of the TV:AM scene but soon descends into weirdness before it becomes simply annoying. And has nothing to do with Kill Bill.

Breakfast TV show Crack of Dawn – presented by pretty Dawn (Fielding) and her slimy co-host Cliff (Easter) – is kissing goodbye to the male half of the presenting team and the shortlist of ‘celebrity’ replacements (due to be announced on Halloween) is being hunted down and killed by a psycho called the Breakfast Cereal Killer by the press.

Studio runner Danny aspires to be a presenter but is thwarted every time by Cliff, his own stupidity, or the presence of the mystery loon who begins by doing away with the producer before targeting the prospective replacements: ancient radio DJ Tony Blackburn, squeaky-voiced comedian Joe Pasquale, camp astrologer Russell Grant, and titular on-the-road co-host Keith ‘Cheggers’ Chegwin. All want the job, all are under threat. …Or are they?

Despite having the presence of the real Blackburn on set, he is curiously referenced to as a lookalike for a much younger actor in a dizzyingly extraneous tangent, which is never fully explained (this is one of the annoying factors). Elsewhere, post-Shaun of the Dead style comedy is at the core of things, though much of it sadly misfires.

A few lip-curling jokes at the expense of the morning television industry (and its IQ-challenged audience) provide some laughs; the multiple choice questions that nobody can get right (“What would you find on a bookshelf?”) and an ongoing series of pokes at the name of the show/hostess. But the superfluous avenues, dream and fantasy sequences only serve to highlight how little is actually going on.

Chegwin himself happily pokes fun at himself but he’s underused and the conclusion is a real flatliner that leaves several questions unanswered. A few more bodies needed to drop and some more explanations added could’ve made a real difference. Or if Richard and Judy actually HAD met Saw.

Blurb-of-interest: Pickering was in Sleepy Hollow.

Slashademics

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Tell most people you’re “into” slasher movies and they’ll give you this strange sideways look, like they’re doubting the authenticity of the complexities going on inside your cranium.

Pick up any academic film book and you’ll likely only find half a paragraph about slasher movies, writing them off as something like ‘hate-women films’ or the like.

Nevertheless, beyond the Teenage Wasteland’s, Legacy of Blood’s, and Going to Pieces’s’s’s, there has been a fair bit of scholarly study done over the years, much of it in research papers, but also a few books.

Therefore, if you’re looking to broaden your appreciation of the subtextual elements of the teenie-kill pics you so enjoy, maybe give any of these a go…

GAMES OF TERROR: HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH AND THE FILMS OF THE STALKER CYCLE

By Vera Dika (1990)

Way back in the mid-90s before DVD and before my parents stopped thinking the internet was evil sent by Satan, the only existing book about exclusively about slasher films was this.

After I’d devoured as much Friday the 13th and Halloween I could and still found myself hungry, Games of Terror introduced to be to six other early stalker films (as she calls them), which took a good six months for me to track down. This being a good decade before everything was reissued on DVD – only a few of these films were readily available on video cassette.

Rather than analyse psychological elements of the films themselves (see Clover, below, for that), Dika pivots her tome on the structural nature of the sub-genre; the ‘games of terror’ refers to how these films work on an interactive level, breaking down the common plot arc (from the event that prompts the killer X-years earlier to the heroine fighting and surviving), and posing the audience questions: Where is the killer? When will they strike? Who is the killer? etc.

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The holy clutch of ‘stalker films’

Of the three books, Games of Terror is the easiest to get on with. It’s not overly verbose and doesn’t preach an opinion (again, see Clover for that!) and it enabled me entrance on to my Film Theory degree, which of course, I capped off with a research paper on 90s slasher movies, called Scream Queens and Screaming Queens.

The downside of the tale is that Games of Terror is fucking hard to get hold of. Look on Amazon and gasp at the three-figure prices for which it’s being touted! I took it out from the library about five times.

Aww, libraries… like phoning around old video stores, scouring the Free-Ads and taking the bus for an hour to go and get my copy of Happy Birthday to Me for £7 from a run-down old rental store, it all takes me back!

MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAIN SAWS: GENDER IN THE MODERN HORROR FILM

By Carol J. Clover (1990)

Now this is a different kettle o’ fish altogether. Less an entire book, more a collection of essays bound together. The chapter Her Body, Himself is devoted exclusively to slasher films, which Clover begins with by stating that the killers murder a string of “mostly female victims,” and then goes on to namecheck a load of films where male victims outnumbered their gal-pals by significant margins.

Lack of objectivity aside, this is a great chapter for psycho-analysis of some of the grittier issues you sometimes find going on under the surface. Clover centres much of her research around The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (which, ironically, the next book all but excludes from being a slasher movie at all!) and posits that all killers are psychosexually motivated to stab pretty young girls over and over in a grim tableau of the regular intercourse they’re incapable of having.

It makes sense, but her research lets her down. Some facts are plain wrong, while others require a lot of convincing. Still, the parts around audience identification with the killer shifting to the allegiance of the final girl are interesting and mostly valid, but read into sometimes in too much detail, especially when it’s widely considered that the core audience for these movies is frankly too dumb to tell the difference.

The rest of the book covers various other genres of horror and cries misogyny a little too easily at some points. Yes, it’s an issue and yes, some slasher movies revel in it, but Hell Night, for example (a film she discusses), certainly isn’t one of them.

BLOOD MONEY: A HISTORY OF THE FIRST TEEN SLASHER FILM CYCLE

By Richard Nowell (2010)

I only finished reading this book last week. There’s more in common with Dika than Clover, as Nowell charts the business end of the 1978-81 mini-boom of teen slasher films (thereby excluding films that aren’t necessarily tailored for teens, i.e. He Knows You’re Alone).

Nowell’s research levels go far beyond the previous books, though that’s likely because a lot more has been written on the genre in the intervening years. Still, he doesn’t miss a trick, finally pointing out that Clover’s effort has been the only oft-quoted work on the genre, and thus many people have taken her word for gospel thereafter.

Blood Money goes to great lengths to show how the often tiny production companies tailored their films to male AND female audiences, the way trailers were cut to show female bonding and girl-enticing elements of the films (Prom Night being the best example) and, surprisingly, goes to town on pointing out that Halloween was NOT the bootleg blockbuster it’s often painted to be, that it took a long, long time to make its money (much of which came from re-releases well into the 80s) and really showing how a trend starts, peaks, and fades away when it comes to the saturation point in 1981.

The disappointing aspect of this book is that most of the films he charts (those pictured above plus Black Christmas, Silent Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Terror Train, Final Exam, The Prowler, Just Before Dawn, Madman, and The Dorm That Dripped Blood) made much less money than we’re sometimes led to believe. Yeah, they all turned a profit, but some of the amounts were a lot less impressive than their reputations would have you believe, especially in terms of modern money.

* * *

In conclusion – read these! At least some of them. Despite my bitching about it, Carol Clover’s book is quite relevant, just a tad misinformed in place. And if you ever get in an argument with Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin, or the ghost of Gene Siskel, it’d be handy to be able to quote some of this stuff back!

10 final girls we love

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Vegan Voorhees LOVES a good final girl. I’ve read people attempt to remove the need for a final girl in a slasher film over the years (“women are only good for dying” etc). These people are stupid. A slasher film without a final girl or a killer is almost always crap.

So, anyway, here – in no particular order – are ten of VeVo’s favourite horror heroines:

Molly Nagel (Renée Estevez)

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)

Cutesy camper Molly is pretty much the only good girl at Camp Rolling Hills, under the watch of puritanical/homicidal/transsexual camp counsellor Angela, who rather indiscriminately “sends home” all of those who don’t act like a good young person should. Molly’s fate is left a bit up in the air, but from a throwaway line of dialogue in the third movie, it seems like she didn’t make it : (

There’s nothing particularly outstanding about Molly as a character: she adheres to all the assembly line clichés of the role in her goody-two-shoes way, but Estevez is winsome in the part.

Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals)

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)

Plucky reporter Taylor and her crew of two follow burgeoning mass murderer Leslie Vernon, who intends to rid the archetypal small town of Glen Echo of its surplus teenage population. However, he’s been leading the crew a merry ride by pretending he’s already picked his “survivor girl”, but it turns out he intended to face off with Taylor all along.

Her realisation of her placement as the final girl is something of a great moment in Leslie Vernon, and Taylor takes to the task with veritable gusto, besting Les in classic FG stylee.

Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt)

Urban Legend (1998)

Secretive Natalie is the numero uno target of the Parka-clad killer who’s stalking the campus of Pendleton University, offing her friends in inventive fashions. While she is naive enough to believe that it’s all something to do with a murder spree that occurred there twenty-five years earlier, deep down she must know that the bad thing she once did has come back to bite her in the ass!

Some people considered Alicia Witt miscast for the role, but her ‘bad fit’ is why she’s such a great final girl. Instead of the usual bubbly blonde chick or moody brunette ‘with issues’, Natalie is a booksmart, guilt-laden character who is eventually forced to shoot her best friend.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Halloween (1978)

The original final girl, Laurie Strode survived the murder sprees of Michael Myers on three separate occasions. But everyone remembers her best as the babysitter from heaven in John Carpenter’s original flick. Laurie is comprised of all the elements that make the final girl: she’s watchful, ever so slightly paranoid, virtuous, shy, and genuine.

Curtis played the lead role in other slasher films, but she never again scaled the heights of empathy that Laurie evoked as WE joined her in terror as she ran, hid, and eventually fought back.

Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

In Carol Clover’s book Men, Women & Chain Saws, she calls Nancy the ‘grittiest’ of the final girls. Wes Craven wrote his heroine as more reactive than most (something that follows through into the Scream movies); as her friends fall victim to dream stalker Freddy Krueger, Nancy resolves to take the fight to him. She purposefully goes looking for him in her dreams and, when she figures out how she can kick his ass, rigs several traps using household items, and unleashes it all upon her would-be killer.

The can’t-sleep motif at the centre of the Elm Street opus helps characterise Nancy as a great final girl: her folks believe she’s crazy, the doctors think she’s crazy, and even she begins to question her own sanity after more than seven days without sleep. But her paranoia wins through and Nancy emerges as the only survivor.

To emphasise just how good she is, watch the 2010 remake for Rooney Mara’s bad cover version.

Ginny Field (Amy Steel)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Assistant camp counsellor trainer and child psyche major Ginny meets all the functions of the standard final girl and blows most the competition out of the water. Ginny ‘senses’ the presence of something not quite right about the camp and is the only one who takes the threat of “a Jason” seriously. She crawls through windows, hides under bunks, wets her pants in fear, and finally uses her child psychology skills to fool Jason into thinking she’s mommy.

It’s difficult to list exactly what about Amy Steel is so appealing. Essentially, she does very little that her sisters-in-terror don’t. Her performance is neither racked with emotion or personal loss, but she simply seems to fit the mold almost perfectly, doing all the things we want her to do and coming out the other side with her life intact. She’s plucky without being annoying, tough without it seeming unlikely, and smart without being cocky.

Erin (Jessica Biel)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Michael Bay’s remake of Tobe Hooper’s landmark classic (which I’m not all that fond of), changed the leading lady from shrieking victim into a can-do ladette with growing star Jessica Biel convincing enough as a reformed juvie-hall probie whose road trip through Texas in 1973 becomes a nightmare of epic proportions.

Is it likely girls would have acted this way forty years ago? Maybe not, but TCM barely reflects the era it’s set in anyway. The characterisations are sketchy and malleable to the 2003 audience, which means that Erin pretty much steps through a time warp from modern post-Ripley female warrior ideals to do battle with Leatherface and family. But she’s appealing nevertheless. I was toing and froing between her or Eliza Dushku in Wrong Turn, but I think Erin just about has it.

Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey)

Black Christmas (1974)

Sensible and ever so slightly moody Jess turns out to be the final girl in the pre-everything scare-a-thon that is Black Christmas. Secretly pregnant by her highly strung boyfriend and concerned about the disappearance of a sorority sister and the stream of obscene phone calls their sorority house keeps receiving, Jess is under a fair bit of pressure from several angles.

Olivia Hussey was quite a big name when she made this film, but as it predates the conventions of the genre by some years, her eventual uprising as the heroine isn’t the cliché it would be now. Jess isn’t the ‘nicest’ girl in the group, she’s evidently not a virgin, and doesn’t want to compromise over the planned abortion of the child. In short, this kind of girl would NEVER be the heroine if the film were made these days. Still, these points only serve to define her character as realistic (as are most of those in this one) and so she becomes a good, ‘outside the box’ final girl in a similar way to Natalie in Urban Legend.

Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi)

Final Exam (1981)

In this tame post-Halloween campus-slasher, the killer stalking a group of college kids has no apparent motive and, in a reflection of this randomness, the nominal heroine, Courtney, becomes so by a similar lottery-of-gloom. Unlike many of her kin in this list, there’s not much to know about her: She’s the nice, conventionally pretty girl who constantly seems to be providing an ear for her friends’ various problems, whilst worrying about exams and wondering if she has a weak personality.

Eventually, all those extroverts who don’t care about their own personalities are knife-fodder and Courtney ends up running for her life around a deserted campus, until she is forced to fight back and, literally, get her hands dirty. Very dirty. In this straight-forward film, it’s nice to have an equally straight-forward character outlasting everyone else.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell)

Scream 1-4 (1996-2011)

Last but by no means least, the final girl who just keeps getting put through the ringer. If you were Sidney Prescott, you’d be quite pallid of character and wear lots of dark coloured, sensible clothes too. Her mom was raped and murdered, first boyfriend turns out to be the one who did it, then he tries to kill her, then his MOTHER tries to kill her, then her mystery half-brother confesses to have been playing puppetmaster all along. Then, when she’s had a decade of rest, her own cousin tries to kill her!

Blood runs thicker than water, and Sidney’s sure seen more of it than most. But she copes, she fights and she survives every time despite tremendous odds against her: One final girl against a total of seven different psycho killers. I was never that keen on her in the first movie, she seemed too obvious, but as more and more of her buddies flatlined, she became gradually more mysterious and put-upon, which made me like her more. Plus she’s stuck it out and done four movies, more than anyone else in the same predicament.

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Stock Background Characters 101: The Goth

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In this feature, we examine the lesser beings of the slasher movie realm, which, if you’re making your own slasher film, could provide a good cast roster for you.

No killer or final girl profiles here, this is a celebration of those underlings who made the most of their fleeting flirtation with stardom. And usually died.

Time to paint your nails and get moody with THE GOTH

goth1a

Overview: Who didn’t have dark and dismal moments in their teenage years? Some of us repress, some of us do all we can to fit in, and some of us paint our nails black, die our hair black, and wear lots of black. And talk about vampires n’ shit.

Unlike many of the Stock Background Characters we’ve already covered, Goth’s are fairly commonplace folk. Hell, I dabbled way back when (much to the displeasure of my devout Christian parents). But we’re talking slasher movies here, where character type is stereotype and nothing more.

Linguistic Snapshot: “What’s the point in running – we’re all gonna die sooner or later anyway? Death is beautiful, might as well get stabbed now than succumb to some horrible flesh-eating disease in a few years.”

Styling: Black. Black. Black. And maybe some deep reds. Hair cannot be natural colour. Heavy boots are the preferred footwear; fishnets for girls; dark glasses; silver jewelery galore; black lipstick; piercings; tats.

Hallmarks: Goths are largely depressed/ing backgrounders; outsiders to the main gaggle of teenagers. On the outer rim of the social collective, they’re there usually to make comments about how hopeless the situation/circumstance/life is.

Despite rarely surviving the murder spree of the picture’s loon, The Goth(s) can sometime provide valuable insights into the dilemma. It’s worth noting, however, that they – like Nerds, Geeks & Dorks – are coded almost sexlessly. Sure, they’re usually played by good looking actors but, in terms of the plot, they rarely, if ever, get any.

Downfall: Most slasher flick’s rarely develop the Goth character beyond any sense of be-downbeat-then-die, although there are a few notable exceptions. Take Molly in Ripper: Letter from Hell as a prime example of Goth as heroine: she dresses for the part, has a bad attitude, and is generally pessimistic about the situation (having been the sole survivor of a previous massacre). Under normal circumstances, Molly would be scheduled to die early but emerges as the final girl. Or is she killer? Actually, if anyone categorically knows what the hell goes on at the end of Ripper I’d be obliged!

One of the heroines of See No Evil is also a tattoo-plastered goth chick.

Elsewhere, Goth characters die un-sensational deaths at the hands of the killer. They are usually drawn as pacifists, even enfeebled people, without much pluck. Taryn, the junkie sub-criminal of Elm Street 3 ‘dreams’ herself into a tough goth counterpart and spars with Freddy in a suitably grimy dreamscape but eventually falls foul of her unreconciled drug addiction.

In Urban Legend, Lithium-toking Tosh (genre fixture Danielle Harris) is the final girl’s roommate and the killer manages to pass off her murder as a suicide; wannabe-killer goth Damien (Alexis Arquette) is done in by the reanimated Chucky when co-goth Jennifer Tilly resurrects him. Then there’s goth-duo Ian and Erin of Final Destination 3, who, while not buying into it, have a few decent theories about Death and its proposed plan to eradicate them.

Genesis: It would seem as if the first goth-like character in a slasher film was awkward-inmate Violet from Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning. While not adhering to the later conventions of ‘goth’, which seemingly came into being in the 1990s hand-in-hand with the grunge movement, Violet is a moody, difficult teen (but she’s at a halfway house for such problem youths so she’s working on it) who robot dances to horrendous neo-rock music and has a post-Madonna dye-job.

In Friday VIII we get JJ, guitar-rockin’ cross between punk and goth who bites it way too early. Then there’s Taryn, and Arab from Sleepaway Camp III in the morphing period between 80s spandex rockers (see also Dokken’s hilarious Elm Street 3 music video for ‘Dream Warriors’). It’s also worth chucking in Ally Sheedy’s neigh-vocal Alyson from The Breakfast Club, as important a teen movie as there could be for the 80s. The chick from Detention (pictured (very) top right) is undoubtedly based on her.

Legacy: In the post-Scream movies, female goths started to grow into the frame with regularity. Tatum from Scream (Rose McGowan, who dated and I think maybe even married Marilyn Manson) is adorned with hints of the look, then on to the aforementioned Tosh, Molly in Ripper, and those we see dotted throughout the genre today. Though there’s still some way to go in terms of gender equality: goth girls vastly outnumber their male counterparts in the way that nerd boys have very few female equals

sbc-gothgirls

Laurie, in Halloween II (2009), has turned from bookish schoolgirl to full-fledged goth-chick, so much so that she becomes almost unbearable as a character (let alone the heroine). Rob Zombie packs both films full of such characters, affiliating them with white trash backgrounds.

A trio of ‘comedy-goths’ appear in Brit-slasher Tormented, who crop up around the edges and saying terribly cliched things about death, music nobody understands, and voicing their feelings about how misunderstood they are. With the rise of “Emo” as a sort-of insult on the back of the whole “goth thing”, characters who dress in black and talk about magic and psychic stuff are treated like moronic idiots and made fun of. Curiously, the trio of dim-bulbed goths in Tormented are allowed to survive (though one is deafened by over-loud music forced on him).

Conclusions: To be a goth, or to not be a goth. It’s interesting that there have been a couple of final goth girls in recent years (though neither were particularly likeable or memorable) and that not everybody whose parents disapprove of the clothes they wear, the colour of their hair, and Slipknot, is with certainty doomed.

That said, it’s still safer not to stand out from the crowd. THAT said, it’s safer still not to go to the party at the old cemetery (sucky, if you’re into all that shit) or explore the rundown old school.

Life is full of dark shit, make sure you don’t get so dark that you become full of blades.

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