Jack Davis and a Ha-Ha Halloween

Here are some Halloween laughs from one of the world's best cartoonists. Jack Davis is an artist with an unmistakable style. He made his reputation in Mad comic books of the 1950s, but went into advertising art, famous for movie posters and record album covers, among other things, like these bubble gum trading cards.

These funny monster cards came out in 1959, published by Topps Chewing Gum, under the name Bubbles, Inc. Topps also did the infamous Mars Attacks gum cards in 1962.

A Halloween tale of a witch, paranoia, poisoned trick or treat candy...and a cat

Fiction

Copyright © 2011 Postino

    It’s true I’ve been off my medication for a few months. I just didn’t feel like myself when I was taking it. It makes my brain fuzzy, and I need to be sharp to keep up with Hester.
    Hester is my cat. Or maybe it’s more proper that I’m her human. She's a black cat, inky black, with gold eyes. She talks, amazing as that sounds. She's the reason I put the poison in the Halloween candy. She told me to do it, because she told me what the neighbors were saying about me, and the way to get back at them was through their children. Their kids sometimes taunt me. When they see me they call me crazy.
    Hester came to me one day a few months ago. I was sitting on the back porch thinking I should mow the lawn when Hester came stalking through the tall grass. I think she was after a mouse or a bird. She saw me and came to me when I called out “kitty.” She didn't have a collar, so I figured her to be a stray. She wasn’t shy and didn’t run from me. I thought she could be someone’s lost pet. I didn’t have any cat food in the house. We don't have a cat — or a dog or a canary, either, for that matter — but I found some baked chicken I was planning to put on a sandwich, and I shared it with her. She was very hungry. She left but came back the next day. I found some canned chicken in the pantry and gave her some, along with some half-and-half from the fridge.
    This went on for a week or more. I didn’t tell my wife, Ellen, about the cat. She hates cats. But Ellen, she’s a good woman. She works hard you know. I haven’t worked in a couple of years. It’s the bad economy. We get by because Ellen works two jobs, so she isn't home except to sleep, and I’m home alone watching the television. Or at least I watched television until Hester told me the neighbors were using their satellite dishes to spy on me through the TV.
    I mentioned Hester told me to put the poison in the candy. I see your looks of disbelief and the glances you’re giving each other. Cops. You think everyone is guilty. Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? What I'm telling you is the truth and I can prove it when Hester gets here. Anyway, I was calling her Kitty. “Here, Kitty, come get your chicken.” I'd keep up a stream of conversation telling her she was a good kitty, a pretty kitty.
    Shortly after she first came to me she looked up from her chicken dinner and said, “Don't call me Kitty. My name is Hester.” I tell you, I about fell off my chair. And you have those looks again, but she said it to me, and she said it in a female voice. She told me why her name was Hester. She said, “It was my name when I was a woman. I died and since then I've been through many bodies, both animal and human. This is just my latest.” Flabbergasted. I was flabbergasted.
    She told me her story: “Centuries ago in Salem I was a witch. They put me on trial, found me guilty of witchcraft, tied me to a stake and burned me. That wasn't enough. They hanged me, too. But I cheated them. Before I died I used a spell to send my soul out of my body. At that very moment a dog in a nearby barn was having puppies and my soul ended up in one of the pups. The stories I could tell about my many lives! I don't have a choice into what species I'm born. Like this cat. I would never choose to be a house cat, small and weak.”
    What a coincidence! Just a few days before I'd been watching a show on the History Channel about witches in Massachusetts, and witches’ familiars are black cats.
    Hester left and I had all night to think about what she had said. It made some kind of sense to me. I’m not a religious person but I’ve sometimes had the feeling I might have been someone else in a prior life. When I’m not on meds, that is. When I’m on meds I don't even feel I’m in this body.
    Remember, my wife didn’t know about Hester. After Ellen ate the poisoned candy I told her, but I don’t think she was in any shape to understand. I told Ellen it wasn’t my fault, but Hester’s. I'm sorry Ellen is so sick, and in the hospital, but I didn’t intend that. After all, she's been my wife for over thirty years and what will I do if she dies?       
    Hester told me, “You should hear what your neighbors are saying about you.” She told me since she met me she had been going through the neighborhood, from house to house. People say all kinds of things in front of her. They don't think a cat can understand them. So Hester said she’d heard things they said, that I acted like a crazy person, yelling at their kids. They said I was lazy and off my rocker, letting my poor Ellen work night and day while I sat home on my ass. They could watch me in my house through my TV. That spooked me plenty. When they weren't watching me inside they were watching me when I’d go outside. My next door neighbor told someone she could see me from her kitchen window, in my yard talking to myself. Obviously I was talking to Hester, and why she couldn’t see the cat I don't know. Another neighbor said she’d seen me in the store and I was unshaven, had on an inside-out t-shirt and when she said hello I just brushed on by. She even said I smelled bad, like I wasn't taking care of my personal hygiene. That could be true. I don’t remember the last time I took a shower. I don’t remember seeing my neighbor in the store, but it’s always possible I was thinking about something else and just didn’t notice her. I think a lot of things, and sometimes they’re all jumbled in my brain. I don’t always notice people. She’s the one I think told you she saw me buying rat poison. She could have spread that malicious story amongst the neighbors. That could be why the neighborhood bitches gossip about me, saying they think I might be dangerous, or violent. What a laugh. Me, dangerous! Me, violent! I never hurt anyone. Never!
    Hester told me the whole neighborhood was in on a plot to get rid of me.
   Every day Hester would come by and report what they were saying. Knowing they had a conspiracy against me made me feel sick. Soon I only went out of the house if I had to, just to buy food. I closed all the blinds and kept the house dark. I didn't want anyone looking in my windows, but I couldn't see out, either. I depend on Hester to keep me informed. Hester was working some witch magic on me, telling me awful things the neighbors were saying. It made me angry, made me want revenge. But she was doing it for my own good, because she loves me. Hester is a very clever witch. She may feel that cats are “small and weak,” but she’s still got a witch’s power. Over a very short time she made herself the focus of my life. I believe she put a spell on me. I fell in love with that cat.
    I’m sorry Ellen ate some of the candy and it made her deathly sick, but I’m not glad I won't be giving any poison candy out to the neighborhood kids. They’re all little monsters, and I hate them and their spying, plotting parents. I’d be happy if they were all dead. But because of Ellen you traced the poison back to me. My bad luck.
    It’s just that I can’t go to jail right now. I know you cops have to do your jobs, but I have responsibilities. Ellen will need me to bring her home and take care of her when she’s released from the hospital. And Hester...Hester will still need to be fed. She may be a witch in a cat’s body, but that doesn't mean she doesn’t need to be fed, and have fresh water in her bowl. You understand that, don’t you? Some of you probably have animals of your own. So, no, I can’t go to jail, and you'll understand when Hester comes for her dinner and I have her talk to you. You just have to take these handcuffs off me and listen to reason.
    You should arrest my neighbors. They’re the ones who should be in jail. When Hester gets here she can tell you I’m a good person, innocent of everything but being under her witch’s spell, and of loving her.

Ginger Snaps twice

The Fitzgerald sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, are two high school girls who are the proverbial outsiders: they don't fit in with the "in" crowd. They are morbid. They vow when the time comes they will die together. They take photographs of themselves in elaborately staged death scenes for a slide show in a class. The teacher is disgusted, but one of the boys in the class speaks up, "Can we see the ones with Ginger again?"

That's because Ginger can be very sexy.

Her sister, Brigitte, is an introvert, appalled by Ginger's behavior.

The movie, Ginger Snaps, catches the sisters just as Ginger experiences her first menstrual period. Simultaneously in their suburban community there is some sort of wild animal attacking and killing the local dogs. That doesn't seem to bother Ginger and Brigitte, who go out for a walk at night. They are attacked by the creature, who is attracted by Ginger's period. The attack is thwarted, and the creature is killed when hit in the street by a van. Ginger is wounded but won't tell her parents. Oddly enough, her wounds begin to quickly heal...

Oops. That means that Ginger has been bitten by a werewolf, and is infected.

Ginger Snaps, despite its clever punning title, is a horror movie, and works on a couple of levels. First, there are the girls and their teenage angst. They have enemies at school, including a group of mean girls. Ginger has the interest of one boy in particular, and she uses it. When she ovulates she goes after him and they have sex (off camera, darn it). He tells his friends in the bleachers, "Ginger Fitzgerald rocked my world!" to a round of high fives. Then there is the creature, barely seen, then killed, with Ginger gradually becoming a werewolf herself.

Brigitte takes it upon herself to find a cure for Ginger's lycanthropy, devising a solution from the plant, Monkshood. It's poison, but not in small doses. It retards the advance of the werewolf condition. But poor Ginger is doomed, despite Brigitte's help. At the end of the movie Brigitte is also infected.

The movie, a 2000 Canadian import, stars Katherine Isabelle as Ginger, and Emily Perkins as Brigitte. Both are excellent actors, and Perkins is good enough to get top billing. They're older by a few years than the characters they play (Isabelle was 19 playing 16, Perkins was 23 playing 15), and both had been child actors with a stack of credits on the Internet Movie Database. Despite their youth Ginger Snaps shows how professional and accomplished both are at their craft.

It's not a big budget movie, which means its strength comes from the story and its believable characters. It does an effective job building suspense as Ginger changes. Maybe because of the budget, the scenes with a monstrous werewolf are very carefully edited. The monster is not totally convincing.

Sometimes it looks like a large puppet, sometimes it looks like a man in a costume. But with sound effects, music, and action in the dark covering the beast's imperfections, the scenes are skilfully done. Budget aside, Ginger Snaps is an unexpected pleasure on all levels, with the actors' performances of a witty and suspenseful script giving the movie much credibility with the audience, even if the monster is lacking.

Ginger Snaps begat Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, from 2004. As we saw at the end of Ginger Snaps, Brigitte has infected herself to share Ginger's fate. Ginger is only in this movie as seen in Brigitte's imagination, a Cassandra telling Brigitte how doomed she is.

The sequel, with Emily Perkins as Brigitte in virtually every scene, is a different movie from the original, but in some ways may be better. The script lacks the morbid humor of the original, but is suspenseful. No, the monster tracking Brigitte still isn't very convincing, but Brigitte is.

Brigitte, in order to stall the progression of her own lycanthropy, is hiding in a motel from her stalker, a werewolf, and taking intravenous doses of monkshood. She overdoses and ends up in a rehab center with more mean girls, and a comic book-reading girl called Ghost, who attends to her burned grandmother. Ghost is the blonde girl to Brigitte's right.

Deprived of the monkshood, Brigitte begins her inevitable slide into becoming a werewolf. She is taken advantage of by a rehab center employee, Troy, who trades drugs for sex. Poor Brigitte multiplies her problems as the movie goes on.

Brigitte and Ghost escape the center. They steal one of their cars, and head for Ghost's home, now empty since the grandmother was so badly burned. It's there where the final showdown occurs between Brigitte and everyone and everything stalking her.

Brigitte is a resourceful and determined character, but her doom is assured (this is a horror movie, after all), but then, so is the doom of about everyone else, too, including the werewolf.

Both movies are great for Halloween viewing. There was a third movie, making this series a trilogy, but for some reason the setting for the characters is in the Canadian wilderness of over a century ago. I have never been able to watch it.

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Let Me In

It's Halloween in a week, so it's time to get spooked. I recently watched a DVD of a moody horror movie, released in 2010:

Owen is a delicate-looking young teenager, who is bullied by a gang of three tough kids. He doesn't tell his mother, with whom he lives in a cheap apartment, because she and his dad are divorcing.

The boy is a voyeur, and watches his neighbors through a telescope. He sees an older man with a young girl. They are moving into the apartment next door. When he meets the girl, whose name is Abby, she is barefoot in snow. He asks, "Aren't you cold?"

She says, "I don't get cold."

Abby tells him she is twelve, like him, but doesn't know her birthday. "I have been twelve for a very long time."

Let Me In is a moody and deliberately paced remake of a Swedish film, Let the Right One In. The setting has been transported from Sweden to Los Alamos, New Mexico, but the overall atmosphere of the movie looks Swedish to me. ( I haven't seen the original Swedish version of this film. I recently watched all three of the "Girl Who..." movies in their original Swedish versions, and Let Me In has a similar look of darkness and disconnect.)

We know right off that Abby is a vampire, and she sends the older man, called "The Father" in the cast listings, to get her the blood she needs to survive. Abby can get her own blood if necessary, but apparently it's his job to provide it for her. He gets it by killing. Since we see later in the movie a photo of him as a teenager next to Abby, who looks exactly the same, we know this is a relationship that has gone on a long time.

The Father is played by Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under), a fine character actor. We learn in a making-of featurette on the DVD that Jenkins came up with the idea of his character going about his business of murder wearing a garbage bag with eye holes. It adds so much to the aura of spookiness that the filmmakers agreed readily with his idea.

When you get right down to it there really isn't much in Let Me In we haven't seen in vampire movies before. The myth of vampirism, can't go out in daylight, can turn into a bat, is preserved, although the bat part is implied rather than shown. The only thing I saw in this movie I hadn't seen before is when Abby crosses the threshold into Owen's apartment without getting his permission to come in, she begins to bleed from her scalp.

The performances are great. The two young actors, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Owen and Chloë Grace Moretz as Abby are asked to carry the movie and do it. I'm impressed by how good they are. Richard Jenkins looks like who he portrays, an aging man who has done terrible things.

Matt Reeves co-wrote the screenplay and directed. He also directed the movie, Cloverfield, which I have reviewed a couple of times, here, and here. I thought Cloverfield was a good movie (although derivative of Japanese monster movies) with a terrible title. I also think Let Me In is derivative of several vampire movies, including Salem's Lot and the original Fright Night, and also has a terrible title. What else can I say about the title, Let Me In except it doesn't sound like a vampire movie.

Here is a trailer for Let Me In:



With the DVD you also get a well-drawn little (4 1/2" x 6 1/2") comic book. It's part 1 of 4, a preview of a mini-series from Dark Horse Comics, a prequel to the movie.


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