Dreams Beneath a Desert Sky

Muslims pilgrimage to Mecca. Jews to Jerusalem. Catholics to Rome. Entertainers go to Vegas. So said Bono at Friday night’s U2 concert in Sin City.

This sums up U2’s musical journey better than I ever could. I remember in the mid-90s reading a biography of the band called Until the End of the World. It proposed that Achtung Baby, their 1991 release, was a concept album – charting a spiritual progression through the dark night of the soul, from sensory overload to spiritual salvation. Most of U2’s recent albums since have ended on a quasi-religious note (three of the four band members are avowed Christians), but it seems to me that the entire decade of the 1990s was their dark night of the soul… and that darkness is still visible in their 360 Tour light show.


The band’s history breaks down into roughly four phases:

1976 – 1983: Larry Mullen pulled the band members together while they were all still in prep school in Dublin. They took on manager Paul McGuinness in 1978 and released their first EP in 1979. A year later, Steve Lilywhite produced their first full-length album, a hard-driving guitar rock album called Boy, which gained the band some recognition in the U.S. Their second album, October, found the group almost completely overwhelmed by politics and religion. War, their breakthrough album, successfully combined the band’s early sound with more sophisticated songwriting that expressed their political and religious agenda. They never looked back.

1984 – 1989: Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois took over as producers on the next two albums, The Unforgettable Fire (1984) and The Joshua Tree (1986), and helped to enhance the band’s distinctive sound – making it looser, more textured, ethereal and poetic. Today, The Unforgettable Fire is generally regarded as a rehearsal for The Joshua Tree, their acknowledged masterpiece. Both albums explored the roots of American music and paid homage to the likes of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, gospel and the blues. The subsequent stadium tours of the U.S. and Europe established them as “rock’s hottest ticket.” A documentary, RATTLE AND HUM (1988), charted their success… and prompted the first major critical backlash against them. Responding to those who said that they were taking themselves too seriously, U2 disappeared at the end of the decade, to “dream it all up again.”


1990 – 1999: Eno and Lanois pushed a darker, more industrial sound on the next album, Achtung Baby (1991), and the band members reinvented themselves onstage in a multi-media extravaganza called ZooTV. The goal was sensory overload – the band responded to accusations of pretentiousness with evasive sarcasm and blatant over-indulgence. In the eye of the hurricane, they produced a more experimental short album, Zooropa (1993). Their next effort, Pop (1997), was another calculated attempt at reinvention, with producers Howie B. and Flood pushing the band’s sound closer to techno and dance music. The subsequent PopMart Tour was U2’s biggest production yet – so top heavy that practically no one (including the band members) could distinguish any longer between self-indulgence and irony.

2000 – Present: Eno and Lanois returned to the fold to produce a very conscious “return to form” with the 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The subsequent Elevation Tour was equally pared-down and earnest, and fans and critics cited it as a renaissance for the band. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) and the following Vertigo Tour were designed to combine the “classic” U2 sound with the more experimental work of the 1990s. The result was a little bit schizophrenic, and the band underwent a long gestation period for their follow-up, No Line on the Horizon (2009). Eager for a more unified sound, they relied again on Eno and Lanois – who, at this point, might as well be acknowledged as additional band members. The sound was consistent, if overly familiar.


“Familiar” doesn’t seem to be a problem for the legions of U2 fans around the world, and new albums continue to accumulate new fans. At the beginning of the current 360 Tour, one reviewer commented on how amazing it is that most concert-goers appear to know the worlds to ALL of the songs – old and new. The set list emphasizes the Eno/Lanois efforts. Aside from “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” all of the songs are drawn from The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby (the 1984 – 1991 phase) or All That You Can’t Leave Behind, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and No Line on the Horizon (the 2000s). There is no acknowledgment of Pop… but mid-1990s U2 is unquestionably present in the spirit of the production and the performances.

The peak of my U2 fandom came in the spring of 1997, when I bought tickets for an early stop on the PopMart Tour. In a few short months, I collected every U2 song I could get my hands on – including the live albums, the Passengers experiment, and all of the available B-sides (even one that I could only get on vinyl). My favorite was a short track from “The Fly” single called “Alex Descends into Hell for a Bottle of Milk Korova 1” – it was dark and gritty and restless in a way that U2 songs rarely are. The “classic” U2 sound – heard most obviously on The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and All That You Can’t Leave Behind – is about transcendence. This “other” U2 sound – which underlies Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop – is more primal. You can hear it particularly on “The Fly,” “Dirty Day,” and “Last Night on Earth.”

On the band’s best songs, these two sounds and the ideas they convey go hand-in-hand. U2 sings about divisive earthly politics as well as transcendent “oneness.” At the concert in Vegas, it was hard not to feel like we were all part of one big, crazy family. The girl sitting next to us exclaimed loudly that we were “neighbors forever because we were U2 neighbors.” Of course, she was falling-down drunk. Bono was much more convincing, leading a rousing karaoke crowd through “Magnificent”: “Only love can leave such a mark.” If we don’t remember the people sitting next to us in ten or twenty years, we will certainly remember the night and the sound of the music under the desert sky. It’s no exaggeration to say that concerts like this can be a borderline religious experience – the production values (on par with PopMart) as well as the music are awe-inspiring.


I suspect that most of the audience members had very strong emotional reactions when the band played the three hit singles from The Joshua Tree: “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “With or Without You.” I remembered having listened to those songs as I drove through breathtaking Joshua Tree National Park for the first time. I was equally moved by the performances of “The Unforgettable Fire” and “MLK,” which I had never heard live. “Ultra Violet,” one of the later songs from Achtung Baby, was another great surprise. For me, however, the highlights were a supercharged rendition of “Until the End of the World” and a show-stopping, primal remix of “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight.” That latter was one of the nine songs that U2 performed from their current album.



While I hadn’t spent very much time with the album before going to Vegas, I must admit that most of the new songs sounded just as familiar and just as exciting as the ones I’ve been listening to for the past twenty years. The words, too, are right on the money. This transcendence is hard-won:

We are people born of sound.
The songs are in our eyes.
Gonna wear them like a crown.
Walk out into a sunburst street.
Sing your heart out, sing my heart out.
I found grace inside a sound.
I found grace – it's all that I found.
And I can breathe,
Breathe now…

Halloween Spirit

Halloween is not just one night for me, it’s a season. As a kid, I associated Halloween with the dying fall, changing leaves, cool crisp air, the smell of chimney smoke and apple cider and pumpkin pie. It was a season of anticipation that began on October 1st and built until Halloween, a day of symbolic transformation that made every other day seem dull by comparison.

Halloween marks the end of summer on the Celtic calendar – the end of the “light half” of the year and the beginning of the “dark half.” According to legend, it was a day when the membrane between the physical world and the spirit world was at its weakest, allowing spirits (good and bad) to cross over into the land of the living. That’s where the tradition of wearing Halloween costumes comes from: We’re trying to blend in with the dead, or maybe to spook the spooks. I don’t remember ever having things explained to me that way when I was a kid, but that doesn’t mean that I was oblivious to the ideas. I understood Halloween as an acknowledgment of death and the supernatural… but it was a celebratory acknowledgment that was always fun, never truly unsettling. (I find myself suddenly thinking of John Carpenter’s comment that his movie HALLOWEEN is “a harmless little movie.”) Some of my best childhood memories are of pumpkin carving, carnival-going, and trick-or-treating on a day when death isn't scary and life is filled with wonder.



When I moved to Los Angeles in October 2006, I was disappointed about leaving the autumn weather behind. I couldn’t imagine feeling the same “Halloween spirit” in a city where it’s sunny and 70 every day, and where the trees stay green all year round. Honestly, while I don’t miss the cold weather, I miss the natural progression of the seasons. But I was thrilled to learn that L.A. celebrates Halloween to the hilt… which probably shouldn’t come as any surprise in a city where so many people make-believe for a living.

This year, it’s taken a little longer for the signs of the season to appear (maybe because of the recession?), but I’m happy to report that my neighborhood is finally beginning to look festive. First thing this morning, I took a walk around the block and snapped a few pictures of decorated lawns. Then I came home and noticed an article in today’s L.A. Times about a slew of upcoming holiday events - carnivals & haunted houses, parties & pub crawls, screenings and celebrity appearances. Suddenly I’m as giddy as a (normal) kid at Christmas. For those who need a little Halloween spirit but can’t escape the computer screen at the moment, may I recommend the following…

The Monsterfest Report

Thanks to everyone who came out for the screening of NIGHTMARES at Monsterfest on Saturday! It was great to see so many friends from M2 Pictures, New Dominion Pictures, Dr. Madblood, Scary Monsters Magazine and The House Between. I arrived early and chatted with Rob Floyd and Jim Blanton, founders and directors of Monsterfest, and Craig Eckrich, who provided “special security” (I won’t ask…). This was the sixth year of Monsterfest, and they had a pretty good turnout.

Right away, my old friend Dr. Madblood pulled me aside for an interview that will appear in his upcoming Halloween special. I met the infamous mad doctor of Pungo back in 2004, when I was working at a production company in Norfolk. I had just published “Nightmares in Red, White and Blue,” which gave me the confidence to approach Jerry Harrell (the man behind the wig) and introduce myself. We had a long conversation about how we each got interested in horror films, and Jerry offered a succinct explanation of why he had first donned the wig. Quite simply, he wanted to reassure kids that it was okay to be different. He’s been a personal hero of mine ever since. Soon after that, I started showing up for weekly tapings of the Madblood series and met the rest of the cast and crew – a fantastic group of people, who are just as funny off-screen as on. They put me to work on a few episodes as the “Brain-wrangler” (if you’ve seen the show, you know what I mean), and treated me like family. I am grateful to Monsterfest for providing a chance to catch up with Jerry and several of his cohorts: Kristen Harrell, Craig T. Adams, Debra Burrell, Carter Perry and Bill Davidson.

The Virginia premiere of NIGHTMARES IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE followed a lineup of short films including an all-puppet version of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (!), and we had a lively Q&A afterwards. Director Andrew Monument and I also sat for a lengthy interview with Jason Bayless, Josh Browning and Paul Casper (who composed the score for NIGHTMARES), which will appear on their internet radio program – Zombie Popcorn – later this month.

NIGHTMARES was followed by the world premiere of the documentary VIRGINIA CREEPERS. I bought a DVD copy of the “special Monsterfest edition” of the doc – which I assume is a bit longer than the final version will be. At 2 hours, it offers an exhaustive overview of horror show hosts from the Old Dominion. Particular focus is given to The Bowman Body, Count Gore de Vol, and Dr. Madblood, but I was especially excited to learn more about some of their lesser-known predecessors (Jonathan, Ghoulda, Ronald the Ghoul, and Hazel Witch) and their internet successors. Documentarian Sean Kotz clearly loves his subject, and the lower-third titles throughout the film prove that his sense of humor is as biting as the creepers.

By the end of the day, nearly the entire cast of THE HOUSE BETWEEN had gathered for the all-night movie marathon. Tony Mercer and Lee Hansen were on hand for a panel discussion on the history of Godzilla movies… and these guys know their stuff. They had so much to say that they only managed to get up to GODZILLA VS. MEGALON (1973) before running out of time. There is already some speculation about continuing the conversation at the Fantasci convention in the spring. (In the meantime, I think they should write the book.) Until next year…

Monsterfest VI

Festival founder Rob "Wolfman" Floyd and the monsters from his closet

MADBLOOD director Carter Perry and a recently-returned veteran of the Iraq War (no kidding)

Dr. Madblood and Me

NIGHTMARES director Andrew Monument with Ro-Man

The director's son, in disguise

The cast of BUBBA HO-TEP 2?

Attending cast members of The House Between… minus Phyllis Floyd, who somehow managed to avoid the camera but who must be acknowledged because, well, Phyllis is awesome. From left to right: Craig T. Adams, Lee Hansen, Craig Eckrich, Kim Breeding, Tony Mercer, Rob Floyd, and Jim Blanton.

The Shriekfest Report

Shriekfest kicked off the Halloween season in Los Angeles this past weekend with a lineup of 14 features and 26 short films – including the west coast premiere of NIGHTMARES IN RED WHITE AND BLUE. Attendees included filmmakers Mick Garris and Tom McLoughlin, both of whom are featured in the documentary, and Eileen Dietz – best known to horror fans as the face and voice of evil Regan (a.k.a. Captain Howdy, a.k.a. Pazuzu, a.k.a. The Devil) from THE EXORCIST. This was the first time I’d met Eileen, and I’m thrilled that she was there to add her devilish humor to the mix.

If you’ve seen NIGHTMARES, you already know that there is a rather lengthy section on THE EXORCIST. Tom McLoughlin talks about the effect the film had on American culture and on his own circle of friends in 1973. What didn’t make it into the documentary are the details of how director William Friedkin crafted this masterpiece by using very subtle filmmaking techniques (including subliminal sounds and images) to convince audience members that they were experiencing true evil. One of the many tricks he used was replacing actress Linda Blair with Eileen Dietz at key moments in the film. It’s these appearances, seamlessly interwoven with Blair’s scenes, that make the possession seem so real.... because we are, in fact, seeing two different people without being consciously aware of it. Looking back now, I realize that many of the images from THE EXORCIST that haunted me the most on initial viewings were images of Eileen Dietz, rather than Linda Blair… and what made them so frightening was that I knew, on a subconscious level, that I wasn’t seeing Linda Blair.

Here’s a test. See if you can identify the actress in each of the following images…






The answers: 1) Linda Blair, 2) Eileen Dietz, 3) Eileen Dietz, 4) Eileen Dietz’s face super-imposed on Linda Blair’s face, 5) actually, this one is tricky… it’s neither Blair nor Dietz, but a dummy created by FX artist Dick Smith. Here’s another interesting fact from the world of THE EXORCIST: Tom McLoughlin was originally slated to direct the prequel, before either Paul Schrader or Renny Harlin got involved. I, for one, would have liked to have seen that version. But I digress…

Shriekfest offered a wonderfully eclectic batch of films. I only saw about half of them, but every one had something to recommend it. The variety of the films made me realize just how many different types of horror there are these days (thus indicating how many different types of horror fans there are these days). There’s the traditional monster movie (see Michael Emanuel’s MANEATER, which is chock full of blood, breasts and beasts), the pseudo-religious ghost story (I love the Spanish because they aren’t afraid to use blasphemy as a plot device, as evidenced by Elio Quiroga’s NO-DO), and the tongue-in-cheek rollercoaster ride (Darin Scott’s DARK HOUSE trumps the similar Dark Castle productions of the early 2000s).

A couple of films inadvertently served to illustrate points that are made in the NIGHTMARES documentary. The thread about the American dreamer-turned-nightmare visionary (which starts with Hannibal Lector and continues with AMERICAN PSYCHO and SAW) plays itself out in Luke Ricci’s film HOW TO BE A SERIAL KILLER. On the small screen, the Showtime series DEXTER has taken this idea to its utmost extreme, by prompting us to completely empathize with the killer -- not just as a vigilante, but as a family member, a co-worker, a boyfriend, a father figure. HOW TO BE A SERIAL KILLER adds self-help guru to the mix, and plays everything for laughs rather than drama. I was surprised at how well it works, thanks to the performances of charismatic actors.

Mick Garris suggests, in the documentary, that the future of horror may be found in the dark fantasies of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, the man behind THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE and PAN’S LABYRINTH. Robert Beaucage adopts that myth-making style in his “gothic fairy tale” SPIKE – which reminded me more of Jean Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946) than of anything that’s come along in the past few years (excepting del Toro’s work). I was thrilled to see such a passionate blend of fantasy and horror… something that’s been sorely lacking from mainstream horror films in the past few years.

My personal favorite of all the films I saw at Shriekfest was Gregg Holtgrewe’s DAWNING. This one is harder to talk about, because it is purely and simply about the Unknown, and it thrives on tone and atmosphere rather than plot. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a filmmaker do so much with so little, but Holtgrewe has the good sense to realize that the most disturbing horror films are often the simplest ones. DAWNING (in its current edit) is a lean 72 minutes, shot in one location with a handful of actors and very sparse dialogue. Darkness and relative silence are all the filmmaker needs to hypnotize the viewer and hold us captive for over an hour. The minimalist sound design forces us to pay close attention to every detail, and the filmmakers have carefully crafted a sense of mystery for each character and every little turn of events. If you like the slow-burn approach of films like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and THE STRANGERS, and can appreciate the metaphysical underpinnings of works by directors like David Lynch and M. Night Shyamalan, then DAWNING will be a very welcome discovery.