Burning Blue Souls

Dedicated to my dear friend, Kati

with Special Thanks to Allegra Harris

The amount of writing I do is directly proportionate to the amount of inspiration I receive. Hence, why I have written exactly jack fuckall for the last couple of months. And it's not like I haven't been trying. I watched Veronica, touted as the movie so scary that gazillions of people were shutting it off halfway through in pants-pissing terror. It was...okay. Good acting, some lovely cinematography. But I was not scared. Not for one single millisecond.

I watched Dunkirk. Wow, that was amazing! The soundtrack alone made my guts clench up in those terrible pre-diarrhea cramps of stress and dread usually reserved for annual employee reviews. I loved it unconditionally, despite the fact that this is now the third movie featuring Tom Hardy in which the final 1/3 of his face is obscured. I didn't even care that his plane continued to fly for two hours after he ran out of gas. I forgave it its few flaws because it was majestic and inspiring and all of that patriotic crap that I haven't felt in my heart since VJ Day...and I was born in 1970. But alas, Dunkirk is not a horror movie and that's kinda what I do. I don't know how to review films outside of the horror genre, and I'm not going to start now.

So, I gave up for a while. Bored. Yep. Boredboredbored. Bored City, Alabama. Been bored so damn long I lost my damn mind. Hum ditty di di, hoo-wah hoo-wah. *fart sounds... Yawn. hoop dee doody... I went to the library and actually read a damn book. Actually, I read six. I rearranged my bedroom. Fuck, Game of Thrones doesn't come back on for another fucking year?!

Then, one cold, bleak morning as I weighed my suicide options, I went onto YouTube to watch my usual morning news programs - The Daily Show, The Late Show, Jimmy Kimmel, etc. - when an ad at the top of the screen popped up. Boats, ice, snow, blood, slo-mo shots of guys drowning, screaming, running, shooting. I saw Ridley Scott's name. The title came up: The Terror. Okay, kinda generic. Mildly intrigued, I clicked. "Based on True Events." Yeah, heard that one before, try harder. "Based on the book by Dan Simmons." Well okay. Dan Simmons wrote Song Of Kali, one of the very few damn books I've read that actually scared the living shit out of me. For some reason, I'd never read The Terror, had no idea what it was about and hadn't heard anything about a miniseries. So I decided, "why the fuck not?" and started watching.

I've been longing for a return to true horror, the likes of which have not been captured on celluloid since John Carpenter's The Thing or the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Void came close, but only in a mocking way, like Peter S. Beagle's comparison of goats to unicorns. Lake Mungo had it, but Lake Mungo flew under the radar so low it was practically out of gas and piloted by Tom Hardy. It was such a slow burn it was damn near flame-retardant. And it would never be touted by today's "James Wan is a genius!" generation, so eager for music cues and Marilyn Manson shock-techniques, as anything other than boring. Damn kids.

The Terror - a ten part miniseries currently running on AMC - is the return to true horror I've been waiting for. It is The Thing, only one hundred and forty years previous. It is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only freezing cold instead of blisteringly hot. It's...fucking brilliant and beautiful and revolting and gives me those same terrible pre-diarrhea cramps that only true horror can inflict. For horror was never the jump scare, the death scene, the splatter of a severed artery or the scream of a virgin. Horror is in the moments leading up to such things; the step before the corner is turned, the shadow in that corner, the pause between ragged breaths.

In The Terror, the true horror is in the setting of the sun, the creak of the bilge against the slowly constricting ice, the sight of a drowned man floating in the ocean like a frozen angel. The true story of The Terror - a ship trapped in the ice of Antarctica for years, its men slowly starving to death or descending into madness via scurvy, turning to cannibalism and murder, until every single man aboard was gone - is bad enough to ponder. Throw in a really pissed off Esquimaux God in the shape of a giant, twisted polar bear? It's what Prophecy could have been and wished it were.

Horror is in the face of gentle Dr. Goodsir (Paul Ready), a decent man unused to indecent behavior, who still believes that people are basically good and worth fighting for, who mourns the death of a monkey he himself had to poison, who collapses in panicking sobs after witnessing the death of a man gone mad. It's in the huge black pools of Commander Franklin's (Ciaran Hinds) eyes as he stares into the abyss, the bloodstained snow behind him, the cold, dark ocean of his grave before him, simultaneously burning and freezing, bleeding and drowning, finally forced into a death far worse than Mance Rayder could have possibly imagined, and without Jon Snow to put him out of his misery.

It's in the arrogant, Lee Harvey Oswald fuck-you grin of Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis), the diminutive buggerer, plotter, conspirator, bed-shitting, whipped bloody, mustachioed mutineer and Robert Carlyle in Ravenous bastard. I hate him more than Littlefinger and the entire Bolton clan combined.

And FYI: that picture there is NOT a spoiler. Not by any means and not even close. As if anyone as devious and slippery and calculating as Cornelius Hickey - if that is even his real name - could be merely hanged like a common cockney criminal.

Horror is also in the dirge of Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen), singing her last song beneath the Aurora Borealis, sacrificing her voice in exchange for a truce between her people and Tuunbaq, the Bear God who gifts her with dead seals and leaves her alive, if not in peace. No, it is unlikely that Peace will be something Lady Silence will ever know again in this lifetime. Not after all she has witnessed: a murdered child, beautiful and still - the laughter of the insane heralding the approach of the beast - the tears of Goodsir, a man who has never shown her anything but kindness and is her one refuge at the barren end of the world.

Poor Captain Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies) with his festering sores and his bleeding scalp and his lowly background,  gadding about in a ballgown, heroic to the end and still yet standing, desperate to shoot down a dragon of his own.

And of course, poor, poor Captain Crozier (Jared Fucking Harris) as a man who doesn't want your sympathy and certainly won't give you any, whose heart was left behind in London, never to return. Whose shaky command is doomed to fail

and who knows there will be no happy ending, not for him, not for anyone. He will never see his lost Sophia again, never return to London, never attend another opera or drink another bottle of whatever spirit happens to be handy, doing nothing at all to disprove the stereotypes of the Irish. He knows they will die here and be gone forever, Clementine. But dammit, he's going to assert his command and do his duty until the bitter end. He's a stubborn man, always angry, sometimes sloppy, very clearly flawed, but struggling to remain as civilized as he can as far from "civilization" as one can possibly get.

This is true horror: human, common, dirty and greedy. Self preservation at its worst. Tuunbaq is merely the encapsulation of the evils the men brought with them, uninvited and unwelcome, in this strange, bleak land, and almost unnecessary. I said almost. The gore and the death and the scarlet sprays of arterial blood on the pristine snow are shocking and generous when they appear, but episodes pass when no monster appears at all. Because the real horror is below decks, in the cans of spoiling food and the blackening gums of the dying crew, the whispers and the palpable stink of men unwashed for months, the shadow of despair apparent in every attempt to cheer themselves, knowing what awaits them is inevitable, and growing closer every day.

If you - like me - are old enough to remember the golden days of horror (i.e. 1970 through 1983ish) and have been pining for the days of true, gut-punching, stomach-sinking, paranoia-ridden, diarrhea-cramping horror - the kind that throws an anchor around your imagination and drags it down into unfathomable depths, there to face bloated, mutated horrors that you never guessed could possibly exist - you will weep with gratitude upon discovering this vast, frozen tundra of horror, filled to bursting with Lovecraftian mythology, isolationist paranoia and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. Watching The Terror is a lot like crawling through an ever narrowing tunnel, knowing there is no way out, unable to turn yourself around, stuck and hyperventilating and slowly suffocating. When you're done with the kids meals of franchise horror and your palate has matured to the point where it can appreciate more sophisticated, thoughtful fare, stick a fork in this frozen bitch. Eat it unthawed and wince as you chew. Enjoy the nausea that grows in your belly as the digestion process begins.

It's a goddamned gourmet feast for the damned. Choke on it.

“The blue flame in his chest had burrowed towards his heart like some alien entity, lingered like a disease, and centered in him as an almost unwanted core of conviction that he would do whatever he had to do to survive. Anything.”

~Dan Simmons, The Terror, 2007
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