31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 5 (Species)

Whaddya at, humanity?

Every so often I come across a thing that I intend to write about, and its impressions on me are only "what in the fuck am I going to say about THAT?". Species, from 1995, is one of those. I guess there are some angles I can poke at. I don't need to be here for a 5000 word screed, after all. I'll just get in, get out, and see what I can make of whatever the hell I experienced. I suppose beginning at the beginning works well enough. Any doubts I had about slotting Species right here faded once I saw the credit "Sil Created By H.R. Giger" at the opening. So, somebody clearly had Alien on mind. Species is a very different take, though. We have horror in sexuality, but... well, our slasher from beyond the stars is a lady this time. Part of what's kept Species in my mind for over 20 years has been that lady. Not so much in her performance as I hadn't seen the movie until now, but in her name. Natasha Hendstridge, making her film debut. A local girl from my island of Newfoundland! THE SEX ALIEN IS A NEWFIE GIRL, EVERYBODY RUN. Hell, she's not even in the opening. The alien/human hybrid Sil is a little girl at first, a little girl who escapes gassing and rushes to freedom. It's hard not to root for her, even as we learn what her objective is through the rest of the movie... but then the horror begins. Tentacles burst forth from this ordinary girl in a bad situation, and she cocoons. Bursting forth some time later, naked and covered in space ichor, is Natasha Hendstridge. Hell, the first we see of her are her boobs. Get used to that. She's topless quite a bit. Something awakens within her once she reaches Los Angeles and gets nice clothes and adapts. Sil needs a man, and she'll kill to get one.

31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 4 (Metroid II: Return Of Samus)

This is real tricky ground we're delving over now. Metroid II is pretty fresh in my mind. Y'know, thanks to that big remake that came out a while ago. Which I wrote about here, in case you missed it. That was a GameFAQs review so it's more formal and... game journalist-y? I hesitate to call myself a game journalist, mostly because what I like to do here is the shit I am about to do right now. That being esoteric waffling bullshit with a hint of mysticism. The intent here is to do that, but everything gets tricky. I might want to write lots about Metroid II in the future and I don't want to blow my entire wad. I'll try and show restraint. Let's talk about Metroid II, how it's spooky, and how it ties into all that Aliens stuff I was babbling about yesterday.

Exterminate.

Metroid II, more than any other game in the series, is haunted. I speak not just of the stark black caverns of planet SR388, or the harsh screeching chiptunes that eventually devolve into droning noise and dread. I speak of the future. Not only is Metroid II's climax a key lynchpin in the plot of the Metroid series, but its legacy is haunted by the future in varying attempts to possess it, and take possession of it. The curtain between worlds is thin here, and things bleed in from other timelines and other worlds. We will focus on those esoteric haunts later, and try and get some semblance of coherence here. First, the game itself. Metroid II, the sequel to 1986's hit NES game Metroid. There are plenty of comparisons to make between Metroid/Metroid II and Alien/Aliens. Thematically it's not a complete 1 for 1 fit, but it works well enough. Metroid II, kind of like my perception of what Aliens was, is a "bug hunt" where our heroine's goal is to destroy every last specimen of a deadly alien species. She encounters and kills many of said alien species before having a big showdown with the alien's queen, retreating into the depths of space with her adopted child. That last part is admittedly one of the future ghosts haunting us, but we'll get to that. Metroid II is much lighter on plot than Aliens, and it doesn't have that whole healing from trauma reading attached to it. Samus Aran, Metroid's heroine, is a capable badass bounty hunter who singlehandedly saved the day in the first game. She was not the terrified last survivor of a lone Xenomorph as Ripley was in Alien's closing moments. No, they apply that trauma to her in the future... and totally botch it, I might add. Still, we're not letting that future in right now. It's a terrible spectre screaming about babies, and we are haunted by it, but clutch your holy symbol close to your chest as we delve deeper.

31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 3 (Aliens)

I don't like it as much as Alien, but I'll be damned if my appreciation for it hasn't jumped up in places on this rewatch.

Pictured: Healing from trauma.

Oh yeah, we're free of the Ghost of September Past now. I'm writing this on the day of. Good lord almighty do I have egg on my face. I freely admit that. Last year I wrote about Alien, which is one of my favorite horror films. Here are those words and here is something I wrote near the end of that:

Aliens is a nice action movie, I guess, but Big Gun Fuck Man Vs. Scary Acid Blood Monster is slightly inferior to The Sexuality Slasher for me.

I mean, fuck me. I fucked it up. That is NOT what Aliens is at all. Oh, there are Big Gun Fuck Men (and Women) in it... but this is not a movie about them. It's partly about them and how they get totally fucked up by the aliens, but to me this movie is about Ripley, her trauma from the first movie, and her making attempts to heal that trauma and help someone else with their own trauma. It's all of this and far more shooty shooty gun gun than the original film had, but I nevertheless find myself with a new passion for Aliens. Let's delve into the Ripley stuff then, because it's what worked on me the most. Ripley wasn't quite the stereotypical Final Girl in Alien, but she ended up being the one who survived all that nasty shit on the Nostromo and even managed to blast a Xenomorph out of an airlock... albeit petrified the whole time and singing a song to herself to keep her nerves at bay. She lived, but nightmares are plaguing her. This shit fucked her up. Now, the Alien series is far from your typical slasher fare, but it's nonetheless a comparison I find myself coming back to. Final Girls have come back in horror movie sequels before. Off the top of my head there's Friday the 13th's Alice, who... died. Then there's Elm Street's Nancy, who... died. Halloween's Laurie Strode, who went through even more bullshit on the same goddamned night and (as of the upcoming film) will have dealt with this Myers shit for 40 fucking years. I haven't seen Halloween past #3 but Ripley's arc in Aliens feels different from those other girls'. Ripley survives her encounter in the first film, is traumatized... but gets to go back and confront her trauma. She wants to help the missing colonists of LV426, as well as destroy whatever xenomorph bullshit is down there. She wants in.

31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 2 (Stephen King Short Stories)

It's still the ghost of September past speaking to you from the evening of the 28th. I write in somewhat of a half-assed time limit fit of desperation, in which I have about 3 hours to get all of my affairs in order before hitting the sack and then hitting the road. It's a tricky bit of timing, and as I said in yesterday's post it leaves us with a bit of... limiting in what we can cover. I admit a certain level of procrastination due to not knowing if this trip was happening or not, but hell. If Douglas Adams can work under a deadline, me too. Here, of course, is the difference born out of desperation. The Enigma Of Amigara Fault was always planned. The following is a spur of the moment thing based on a friend mentioning one of the two things here to me today. So, here earlier than I intended is Stephen King. I gave IT a nice big bit of coverage last year, and now that has a new remake (which I've not seen and won't be talking about this year, sorry) so his meganovels are no stranger to these marathons. Sometimes overlooked, though, are his short stories. What does Stephen King under brevity look like, his horror contained within a smaller liminal space? Not unlike my own situation, actually. Well, I'm going to find out with two especially spooky and effective short stories from his 1985 short story collection, Skeleton Crew. Zooming out a bit, Skeleton Crew is one of the better collections he's done. The stories in it are mostly from the early 80's, a... contentious period for the man (though not for his work); it'll make sense later in the month. Pretty much all of the stories in this book are good ones, but I chose two in which the endings still stick in my mind. Let's get to the good stuff with the first one. Away we go...

31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 1 (The Enigma Of Amigara Fault)

This post is haunted.


Haunted not by any malicious ghoul or ghost, but haunted by the necessity of me actually not being here at my computer on October the 1st. I'm writing this on September the 28th, the eve before I head out. I'm the ghost haunting this post, the ghost of September Past working on spooky words early. As such, we need to be quick about things. I've no time to watch a movie, no time for a lengthy reread of a book, no time to play through a big game. Luckily for us, brevity can be a powerful tool. Here, then, is a one-off short story in manga form which manages to be more terrifying than many feature films, a quick work that is not unlike an expert sword slash of horror. One swipe, one cut. That's all it takes to bring something utterly horrific to life. I give you... Junji Ito's The Enigma Of Amigara Fault. The link right there will take you to it and it will not take you long to read. Of course, maybe you're already familiar. Either way, now you know the terror. Now let's talk about that terror, shall we? As we are to do for the next 30 days, of course.

Metroid: Samus Returns (A Review)

(Hi, kids! I got a copy of that new Metroid game and played it and liked it a lot, so I did a review of it which is right down below this paragraph. It's not as esoteric as my other Metroid posts, being a more mainline review for GameFAQs, but I'm sure you'll like it. Anyway, here's my words on it.)

OH GOD THE BABY GREW UP IN SEVEN YEARS

Metroid. Where do we even begin? It's a pillar of an action/adventure series from Nintendo that's been around for over three decades, but it's the last of those decades that have proven turbulent. The 2010s have been somewhat unkind to the series; 2010's Metroid Other M sought to bring coherent story and narrative to the series and fell flat on its face in doing so. Six years later gave us a spinoff, Federation Force, which further alienated the die-hard Metroid fanbase. The only shining light for them last year was the release of a fan game, Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R). As the name suggested, it was a remake of the second game in the series and radically reinvented it, updating its play style to feel more like later 2D games in the series. Nintendo did not take kindly to this and issued takedown notices for AM2R... and yet, here we are. A year after that unkind business, Nintendo and developer MercurySteam have taken their own crack at reinventing and reimagining Metroid II into a bolder, more expansive form. Did they treat their own creation with more love and care than the fandom that's kept the candle burning for Metroid these long seven years? Here, then, is Metroid: Samus Returns.

Coming Soon: 31 More Days, 31 More Screams!

Hey hey. Very very quick post this time around, while I grapple with writer's inspiration to try and get some motivation to write about some computer games. In the meantime, I'm thinking ahead to the very busy future as the days grow shorter and the nights grow colder. It's September now, and summer's in its dying embers. Thank God for that, but it also means that October's just a few weeks away. Last year I had a lot of fun with a monthly marathon of short writeups on spooky-themed media and I want to do it again! So... that's the plan! October 1st will be the start of 31 More Days, 31 More Screams... and I need your help! I did open the floor to requests last year, but as I recall I only took about one or two. I'd like to do more, if you out there have wild and weird requests for me. Let's do that again, and set a few ground rules.

-Obviously if I did it in last year's marathon, I can't do it again. So... check out the old ones I did before making a suggestion.

-I have a bit of a phobia when it comes to throat trauma, which makes me apprehensive towards a lot of the slasher genre. You can still make that request, but just warn me if such things are involved; I'll let my own genre-savviness warn me of when said trauma's about to happen so I can look away or whatever.

-Basically all forms of media are fair game for this, but if you're going to suggest something more long-form than a movie, be wary of how long it may take me. I'm a fast reader and can conquer books quickly, but more longform video games are subject to scrutiny; my free time's at a bit of a premium, after all.

-I'd prefer if you left your comments here, just so I have them all in one place rather than spread over four different social media channels and messenger services.

I think that's about it. Please pop some suggestions in so I can fill up the month! I used a lot of my favorite picks last year, but I'm sure together we can build an interesting and eclectic list. I'm looking forward to seeing what you all throw at me, and I hope you're looking forward to reading about it!