Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2024 October 30 • Wednesday

Shocktober concludes with a Halloween-appropriate addition to our Meta Marquee page, which is possibly the laziest feature of our humble site.

Behold The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg, at the time the only book on the subject, making a cameo appearance in 1989's The Fly II!

Are you done beholding? Because that's it.

I spent about five seconds considering whether this was actually a cameo by David Cronenberg himself and decided that if Alfred Hitchcock's cameos in Lifeboat and (even more so) Rope count as Hitchcock cameos then this is definitely a Cronenberg cameo.

Happy Halloween!

2024 October 28 • Monday

Happy birthday!

It doesn't get much more classic than The Wicker Man, surely the peak of "folk horror" so far. Let's make its music, mostly by Paul Giovanni, the 828th Soundtrack of the Week.

The case has been made that The Wicker Man is actually a musical. It's persuasive.

Certainly the soundtrack is mostly songs that realize and propel the film and its characters as clearly and deliberately as songs in musicals do. Most of them are very folksy, acoustic-guitar driven with bright vocals. "Corn Rigs" and "Maypole" are excellent examples.

"Fire Leap" has just flutes accompanying several women's voices while "The Landlord's Daughter" opts for careening, shantyish approach with accordion and violin doing a lot of the work.

There are some instrumental tracks as well, some of them originating in traditional folk songs.

And some of the music is taken from the film itself, so you'll hear Christopher Lee and other parts of the movie.

Is it a musical? If you want it to be, sure. Call it whatever you want as long as you call it great.

2024 October 25 • Friday

Happy birthday!

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho has certainly been extensively covered. But if you're interested in it and you haven't heard what Janet Leigh has to say about it yet, then her book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, a collaboration with Christopher Nickens, is one you must read.

Leigh takes the reader through her biography, starting with the very unlikely beginnings of her Hollywood career. (They were so unlikely that when she told studio publicists how she had come to be there, the response was along the lines of, "That's great, we can use that, but you should tell us what really happened just so we're prepared".)

Leigh is an assured narrator of events, witty, discerning and generous. Nickens's role is to provide journalistic information to set scenes and add perspective.

Her account of the film's production is fascinating, as expected. I didn't realize that the voice of Norman Bate's mother was the result of Hitchcock's stitching together three audio recordings of three different people reading her lines. (Anthony Perkins was not one of them.)

Leigh is just as interesting when she raises the curtain on what her life is like, reading The Manchurian Candidate on a flight to DC for JFk's Presidential Gala, for instance, with no idea that the plot of the book would more or less play out in real life and that she would star in the movie adaptation.

Life after Psycho includes acclaim as well as anxiety, as the movie attracts some disturbed people to the Leigh household. Jamie Lee Curtis, one of Leigh's daughters, claims never to have seen Psycho all the way through. I bet Leigh saw Halloween, though.

The first line is "Are you wondering why I waited thirty-five years to do a book on Psycho?".

2024 October 23 • Wednesday

Richard Laymon's horror novel Out Are the Lights looked like it could be an engaging thriller about snuff films. After buying it from Bucket o' Blood in Chicago, I started to wonder, looking at it a little more closely, if it might actually be a young adult novel. Once I started reading it I asked myself it it was maybe softcore porn.

It's mostly about snuff films, though not in a realistic way, with lots of sex but nothing too graphic. It probably doesn't fit into any kind of YA framework but that cover art made me consider it.

The local movie theater is showing short horror films that are extremely graphic and sadistic. The book alternates between the real-life murders that become these movies and a couple of other plots that involve a deaf woman who's a successful romance novelist and beginning an affair with a police officer while her more or less former boyfriend is cheating on her with a rich woman who likes for her quadriplegic and once-abusive husband to watch while they have sex.

The novel bounces back and forth between these narrative threads and ties them together at the end. The snuff films get dubbed dialogue and are actually screened as fake horror movies, but of course our heroine reads lips.

This isn't a great book by any stretch of the imagination but it's definitely different and zips by really quickly.

The first line is "'You sure it's not haunted?' Ray asked".

2024 October 21 • Monday

There can't be any serious debate about Dario Argento's best movie. It's Suspiria. His second best movie, though? That could start some arguments.

The Gutbrain Records staff isn't 100% sure but the 827th Soundtrack of the Week is from his funnest (and contender for second best) movie: Phenomena, with a score by Claudio Simonetti, Fabio Pignatelli and the mighty Goblin.

This presentation is just for the score, so it doesn't include Iron Maiden's "Flash of the Blade" and whatever other songs might have been in the movie.But it does include some unused cues as well as alternate versions and different edits.

The main title music is, ahem, phenomenal. One of Simonetti's best, with dreamy wordless vocals and mesmerizing piano swirls sliding into a massive synth rock groove. This is right up there with some of Goblin's best and might recall some of their Zombi cuts.

Goblin gets four major cues to establish the bulk of the score. "Jennifer" is a beautiful tune that suggests love, innocence and purity.

"Wind" is the creepy suspense track that introduces dread, wonder, tension and excitement.

The driving, pulsating and lean "Sleepwalking" is the perfect musical accompaniment for one of the movie's most memorable scenes and "Jennifer's Friend" is a light and upbeat number, bouncy and more or less sunny but complex, with a few different musical ideas layered on top of each other.

It's a great score for a favorite movie, frequently and affectionately referenced around Gutbrain HQ with the phrase "Chekhov's monkey laser".

2024 October 18 • Friday

Michael Gallatin is a pretty typical male power fantasy action hero. Super smart, super handsome, a super stud, worldly and multi-lingual with a mysterious past—his father was probably no less than Rasputin, just in case you weren't already impressed—he's the only chance the Allies have, several years into World War Two, of stopping some nefarious Nazi plot that might like totally derail D-Day.

And so Michael Gallatin leaves his remote castle home and parachutes into occupied France to meet up with the Resistance and figure out what evil stuff is going on and, you know, deal with it. Because the primary fantasy in these stories is high-level competence.

It would be a fairly standard men's adventure story if it weren't for one other little detail: Michael Gallatin is also a werewolf.

The book is Robert McCammon's The Wolf's Hour. Let's go.

So this book was a lot of fun. Michael Gallatin can transform whenever he wants to. Full moons are not relevant. He can do full or partial wolf. He's totally wolfed out when we first meet him but soon thereafter, while fighting with a Nazi assassin and about to lose and be killed, he goes half wolf to turn the tables.

The World War Two story line alternates with Gallatin's origin story, how he became a werewolf and was raised by a werewolf family/community after his human family is murdered.

Both story lines are equally engaging and thrilling and McCammon is not shy or reserved. He seems to love what he's doing and his enthusiasm is contagious. There's constant action, sex and intrigue. There's even a werewolf version of the John Henry myth and an umpteenth reiteration of The Most Dangerous Game—but this time it's on a moving train with the hunter pursuing his prey through a series of death-trap train cars.

There are page turners and then there's this book. Robert McCammon might be the most unabashed writer I've ever encountered and I wouldn't mind if there were fifty books about Michael Gallatin. This is an evolution and expansion of pulp fiction and men's adventure tropes in the best way.

The first line is "The war went on".

2024 October 16 • Wednesday

The Howling is a very well known werewolf movie. It's based on a novel by Gary Brandner, which is extremely different. The two share only the basic premise, which is itself a spoiler and so won't be mentioned here.

The novel was first published as a Gold Medal paperback in 1977, which would make it one of the very last of the Gold Medals. The Gutbrain library always has room for another one and The Howling is in the stacks now.

The movie has a lot more going on in it than the book does. The novel starts out with a mysterious account of mass violence in a small European village 400 years ago. Then it jumps to present-day Los Angeles and a brutal rape scene whose consequences include loss of pregnancy for Karyn, the victim.

In an attempt to recover from this trauma, Karyn and her husband Roy leave the city for a small, remote town called Drago.

If you've seen the movie The Howling, then you know where this is going. But the path the book takes is quite different and involves, among other things, werewolf sex and lesbian nuns.

One thing the book does better is the procurement of silver bullets. This is both witty and informative in the book. The movie's handling of this same problem is way too much of a coincidence/miracle but is admittedly fun and created some screen time for beloved actor Dick Miller.

Certainly The Howling is an exploitative novel—that's practically Gold Medal's mission statement—but it's interesting to see how much more complex the story was made for its movie adaptation. And Brandner has some very effective suspense and horror writing in here.

The first line is “In the dark Arda forest on the border between Greece and Bulgaria there is a dead gray patch of land roughly one mile square where no one goes and nothing lives”.
2024 October 14 • Monday

The 826th Soundtrack of the Week is an Alfonso Santisteban double feature: his music for the films Killing of the Dolls and Necrophagus.

The title track for Killing of the Dolls is parenthetically identified as "Black and Blue" and is fantastic, combining strings and classical piano flourishes with break beat drums, wah-wah guitar, overblown flute, harpsichord, percussion, electric piano, you name it! It's a bit like some of the later Lone Wolf and Cub music.

The main theme that repeats several times is called "Amor dde cartón" in its vocal version and uses "Für Elise" as a template, sticking closely to that famous melody.

Not just Beethoven but Bach also gets taggedd here in the funky orchestra choral "Opus Bach".

Elsewhere there are other compelling tracks, such as the hypnotically groovy "Los traumas del asesino" and the atmospheric and late-night jazzy "Del sueño a la realidad".

Necrophagus starts out with a solo organ piece for its "Main Title", rather sombre and churchy.

This theme gets a lot of workouts for intriguing combinations of instruments: electric bass, drums, harmonica, flute, organ, etc.

All the tracks are "Seq. 06", "Seq. 07" and so on and some of them are really interesting miniature avantgarde jazz pieces.

2024 October 11 • Friday

Anoka is a short story collection and the debut of Shane Hawk. With the exception of the first story, the territory is very clearly horror—and often very unsettling horror.

All the stories take place in Anoka, MI, although Hawk himself lives in San Diego, CA. The other connecting thread is indigenous life, as each story features indigenous characters and offers comments, observations and insights into both the history and present-day realities of indigenous people. Hawk himself is Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Some of the writing is quite gruesome and even when it's not so viscerally horrifying it's still very disturbing. This isn't a book for everyone but real horror freaks should like it.

The first line of the first story is "When we brought Roland into our home, he had a difficult time adjusting".
2024 October 14 • Monday

The 826th Soundtrack of the Week is an Alfonso Santisteban double feature: his music for the films Killing of the Dolls and Necrophagus.

The title track for Killing of the Dolls is parenthetically identified as "Black and Blue" and is fantastic, combining strings and classical piano flourishes with break beat drums, wah-wah guitar, overblown flute, harpsichord, percussion, electric piano, you name it! It's a bit like some of the later Lone Wolf and Cub music.

The main theme that repeats several times is called "Amor dde cartón" in its vocal version and uses "Für Elise" as a template, sticking closely to that famous melody.

Not just Beethoven but Bach also gets taggedd here in the funky orchestra choral "Opus Bach".

Elsewhere there are other compelling tracks, such as the hypnotically groovy "Los traumas del asesino" and the atmospheric and late-night jazzy "Del sueño a la realidad".

Necrophagus starts out with a solo organ piece for its "Main Title", rather sombre and churchy.

This theme gets a lot of workouts for intriguing combinations of instruments: electric bass, drums, harmonica, flute, organ, etc.

All the tracks are "Seq. 06", "Seq. 07" and so on and some of them are really interesting miniature avantgarde jazz pieces.