Malocchio, a Regifting

When I saw it, my first thought was: I don't know what this is.

My second wasn't a thought but a nuclear gut punch, and the strangest sound escaped my throat, a feral and finite sound, and I vomited until I had nothing left but the lining of my innards with which to stain the snow. 

Staining the snow alongside me was the mutilated head of my wife, the box that had until now contained it upended.

Yes, I've seen the movie Se7en. Liked it, in fact, grim as it is. 

But nothing can prepare someone for this. No horror show, no graphic video game immersion. This was negation. So it goes. As the saying goes.

***

Everyone called her Dresden, which was most certainly not her name. I first saw her dancing on a rooftop, shimmering while the cool air hovered neutral and all the singers lined up in the stairwell. She moved reptilian, askance and quasi mute, dragging a phantom carcass behind her, a gator, a claimant, a caiman, something swamplike and humid.

Buried in silt.

For decades she'd known pain.

It might take a woman to return to this lost and brutal man his jettisoned humanity.

***

Let's see.

Walk into love; don't lose it. The world's mouth is open, its glacier eyes clear and focused. Something like air can be liquid when it's mingled with gold and poured over the massed green ranks of trees that march their lockstep quickstep down to the lake shore. Green chard drizzled with honey. Or butter. A deep blue above, an inscrutable one below. Ingredients waiting for an absent maestro to blend.

Step onto the train, let it move you in lines and swirls against the charcoal backdrop of evening. Lozenges of light—peach, tangerine, coral, and honey—spreading and blinking beyond the glass, distant, removed, passing and appearing, lampooning inchoate nebulae, emergent star fields, microlensed gases, cosmic arraignments. 

My palms are like eyes. My eyes are my hands. Hamsa. Nazar. I am my own amulet. Open, clean, yielding, without doubt.

***

The deluge is comprised of millions of drops. They bounce across my roof, along the railings, upon the anxious surface of the lake, over each and every leaf, countless tiny assaults.

The cabin itself creaks, its wooden bones groaning.

Something inside the fridge is mewling, the weakest of snarls, an enraged kitten-thing. I wake most hours, upon the hour, and listen to the protests of this house, the outrage of its joists and fixtures. The scandal of its frame.

Each kiss innocuous until it's not. I know I must plot my way back from all this. 

I know she isn't coming back.

***

He looks at her, can't speak. She won't even look back.

Eventually he says, "There's a way out of this."

She stands and starts to walk away, part ghost.

"I haven't found it."

She almost looks back but not quite.

"But you might."

Do we all float? Can you hear the hiss? Can you hear the emphasis?

"Okay, don't look at me." 

What the fuck was all this?

***

"Some day you will break like I break."

She stops me speaking, shivers though the air is warm. A child. She is but a child, yet here she tries to reassure me.

I blink and cannot think of anything to say.

Until I do in fact say, "You did no other any wrong. You are my wondrous girl. You are the world's girl. You sang from terraced rooftops, glowed amid the morning light, splashed in crystal pools, breathed the spangled gleam of new-blent worlds. I wish I had the words to tell you what you mean to all. You galvanized the lost. Reclaimed the love we mostly imagined gone. You must not… Please… Forget none of this."  

Etna smokes as always, vineyards trace green hillsides like battalions, veins and tangles and topography; all Europe keeps on bitching like the mad, fractured queen she's always been. Each and every woman has a different secret way to dazzle, to be resplendent. 

But oh. This. This. Who and what on earth was Dresden?

Answer that and all we've done is rediscover love. Which is everything.

28. to 25. Flapping Jaws to Buzzing Saws

25. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 

Ha, I can feel the hardcore horror fans starting to lighten up a little now (while mainstream fans balk). Just you wait. ;) But yeah, Tobe Hooper's low budget slasher film was a benchmark of massive proportions. As with Psycho, it was inspired by the repulsive exploits of real-life killer Ed Gein, although it took that inspiration in a whole different direction, but another predecessor deserving of a nod would be Deliverance, made just two years earlier. And since, there have been hundreds of TCM wannabes, most of them pale shadows. There's a scene where Leatherface slams shut a sliding steel door that still gives me inexplicable nightmares. And it's odd: the reputation of this film doesn't prepare you for its reality. It's not particularly gory, for one thing—plenty of smart misdirection and suggestion precludes the need for it. It's just kind of insane, creepy, and frightening. (And yes, I know the image is from one of a kazillion remakes, but I like its feel; for me it captures some of the dread of the original, and I like minimalist road shots. Whatever.)

26. Se7en  

Ditto. You could flip this and the last entry around. Both are doing a very similar thing: demonstrating the bleak, nihilistic heart at the centre of the police procedural/ forensic psychology subgenre (without these films, we may never have arrived at a CSI, a Dexter, or now, of course, a Hannibal). Crime, horror? The distinction melts away, along with any sense of justice, redemption or hope, with the now-infamous ending. But before we even get there, we've tripped over a series of gruesomely tormented corpses and witnessed some of the worst things humans are capable of. This is some dark and frankly terrifying shit. Casting and performances, as with the previous entry, were nigh on perfect.

27. The Silence of the Lambs  

This is the point where people get upset with me and say Silence is not a horror film. Well, its my list, dammit, and you can go make your own (aw, sounds meaner than I meant it to), and if you think this is a stretch, wait till you see what I have even higher up the list! But I say if this isn't horror, then what is? It's not just Lecter and his taste for both intrigue and human flesh, it's Clarice's courageous yet aching vulnerability throughout, it's the liberal use of real life serial killer awfulness to "flesh out" the backstory, it's creepy as hell from start to finish and finally, how can a movie featuring a man who is trying to fashion a woman suit from the skin of his victims not be deemed a horror film? Every bit as sharp as Thomas Harris's source material with an added feminist sensibility. A film balanced perfectly on its moment in time.

28. Night of the Living Dead  

Without Romero's classic film, we almost certainly wouldn't have had the relentless zombie mania of the last few years. And it always makes me smile that such a bleak, violent, and even subversive film made its debut between the so-called Summer of Love and Woodstock. Ha. Schizophrenic much, America? But like the Body Snatcher movies, Living Dead was read by more thoughtful critics as social commentary, in this case critiquing anything from the '60s counterculture, Vietnam and the Cold War, to American racism. And in terms of its reception, the critical arc went from "junk film" to the Library of Congress adding it to its National Film Registry. (This trailer is funny, yet the film really isn't.)