Michael Walters
Notes from the peninsula
Welcome!
This is my little word garden on the internet—Michael Walters, author (it’s true!). I have a speculative fiction novel, THE COMPLEX, out with Salt Publishing, and I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I would love it if you gave it a try.
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Keep the ghosts happy
The year keeps passing me surprises. Last week I was celebrating a new job back at my old employer, and I was looking forward to an unexpected week’s holiday before starting, then my father fell at home and went into hospital, and now I’m going to be living with him for a week to (fingers crossed) get him back on his feet. It’s like the universe lined my free week up for this task.
The transition between jobs, and sectors, from consultancy back to higher education, is an opportunity to reflect. I want to light a fire under my writing projects, and while I can’t say consultancy was bad for my writing, because I wasn’t writing before that either, getting that job did prioritise my tech career. Work consumed my attention in ways I didn’t expect. The pace, complexity and cultural differences filled my brain with unprocessed material that I had to diligently chug through during evenings and weekends.
In the strange weeks after handing my notice in, I found myself (once again) casting a net over all my creative interests. Guitar! Piano! German! Cooking! Coding! Reading! Writing! Yoga! I picked up Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, by Oliver Burkeman, which I’d read before, and Zen Guitar, by Philip Toshio Sudo, a book that I’ve owned for twenty-five years and never read from cover to cover.
Zen Guitar is slim and conversational, but has a faintly formal tone that suits the subject matter. It applies principles of zen to learning guitar — doing things with the right spirit, from the inside out. Burkeman is funnier, taking apart the modern cult of time management and railing against the endless distractions we take up to avoid the work we want to do. We can imagine infinite possibilities for ourselves, but we have limited time, and we can only walk one path in the unknowable amount of it we have left to live.
Back in 2000, on telling my grandfather I was moving to London for a new job, he told me that he didn’t care what I did, as long as I did it well. I didn’t know then that he was in the final weeks of his life. That advice was sound, and moving coming from him then, but it bothered me, and I didn’t know why. I’ve come to know that doing things well is important, yes, but doing the right thing is more important. He gave me one piece of a two-piece puzzle.
After a rough year (which isn’t over yet), I’m setting myself up to do more of the right things in 2024. And why not try to do them well? It’s getting late. I want to make my ghosts happy.
Brief bliss
I was caught in a work storm for a few months over the summer. Things settled enough for me to take a small risk, which paid off, and this, along with a tremendous lucky break, means I am finally able to tack for calmer waters. I’m being deliberately opaque. I’m sitting in relief’s front pocket like a joey in his mother’s pouch. Brief bliss.
That’s one part of my life. In another my father-in-law died. My wife went to live with her mother in his final weeks to help tend to him. Another storm, separate but overlapping, that eventually blew itself out. The hole where he was is stark, but he’s no longer suffering. It went from a small lump in June, to radiotherapy in August, to palliative care in September, to gone. The nurses had never seen anything like the wound on his neck that grew big enough to swallow him. Nature can be brutal.
He lived a full life and fought for it to his last breath. His death brought a different flavour of relief. I have my life partner back. We haven’t lived apart that long in the twenty-three years we’ve been together.
When you’re fighting to keep your ship afloat, you’re not thinking much beyond the next hour, the next day. Calmer waters means time to look after yourself. I’ve been limping around with a ridiculous injury that I’ve carried for over a year that I made worse with golf lessons. Golf! The least taxing of all outdoor sports! (I was wrong.) Deep gluteal syndrome. Too much sitting down, a lack of glute strength in general, and one side weaker than the other equals excruciating cramp in my right buttock. It’s funny when it’s not hurting. I found a physio and I’m doing the exercises. This was the third storm.
The final quadrant of my life, writing, is becalmed. (Work, family, health, writing - yes, four.) How could it not be with every other part in flames? Instead of writing, or even reading, I chose to lose myself in horror films instead. This worked well. It was soothing. Unreal.
This is what I wish for in 2024. I want to be fit and healthy again. I want my family to be well. I want work to be stimulating, but not overwhelming, which will allow time to stir the embers of my writing. The novel hasn’t gone away. I can feel energy for it. I want the words to flow. It’s sad that it feels like a luxury, or even a privilege, to be excited about life. I do appreciate it. I’m excited again!
Halloween (1978)
Director: John Carpenter
In Haddonfield, on Halloween night 1963, the young Michael Myers, after watching his sister make out with her boyfriend, stabs her to death with a kitchen knife and is locked away. Fifteen years later he escapes and returns to his empty family home. His doctor, Loomis, gives chase, but Myers has already taken an interest in a young high school student, Laurie Strode, and her friends Lynda and Annie. He steals a mask, a kitchen knife and some rope, and sets about a night of multiple murders.
And so I return to where this horror project began, seven years ago, in October 2016, when I decided to watch a few horror films to get me in the seasonal mood. It has a purity that other slashers don’t have — the crisp cinematography, Laurie’s naive, nerdy charm, the simple (perfect) motif of the score. I can’t fully explain it. It’s like Alien in that way. It gets everything right first time. All the copycats and sequels (and requels) can’t recapture the original’s magic.
Enemy (2013)
Director: Denis Villeneuve
This is my favourite discovery of the month. It doesn’t give up its meaning easily, which I respect, and the performances are engrossing. Barely ninety minutes, looks beautiful, has a startling final image, and I’m still thinking about it a day later. The opening scene—a group of well-dressed men, including Adam (or is it Anthony?), watch a woman in a club masturbate before moving to impale a live tarantula on one of her heels—creates a tone of background dread that comes to astonishing fruition in the final act.
Adam is a professor at a university in Toronto, living a repetitive existence in a bland, half-empty apartment, with a girlfriend who comes and goes. He lectures on dictatorships and the different ways they control populations. A colleague at his office suggests a film, and out of boredom Adam rents it. He notices one of the extras, Anthony Claire, looks just like him, so he decides to track him down, but Anthony doesn’t like the unexpected attention.
Adam, girlfriend Mary, Anthony, and his wife Helen, dance around each other as the fantastical fact of these two men’s identical bodies with different personalities plays out. Every scene has something in it, whether a background object or a line of dialogue, that suggests something about the mystery, but nothing prepares you for the final beat and Adam’s ambiguous reaction.
Cloverfield (2008)
Director: Matt Reeves
Monster movies, or at least big monsters in movies, are about destruction, usually of cities, and about how small we are in the face of them. They’re similar to disaster movies in that way — hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves and tornadoes all make us feel insignificant and powerless, which has certain psychological comforts.
Cloverfield is the name given by the US military to a catastrophic alien event in Manhattan, and from the beginning we know the found footage we’re watching is classified. Rob and Beth have broken up because Rob has a new job in (amusingly) Tokyo. They meet again at his leaving party in a Manhattan high rise with their new partners, and just as we discover they might get together, explosions rock the city.
I saw this in the cinema when it came out, and I remember feeling frustrated at the shaky camera and sparse glimpses of the monster. Actually, you see quite a lot of the monster, and I wonder if I was overwhelmed on the big screen, or if I was comparing it to films like Godzilla or King Kong, where the creatures are very much on display. You have to really focus on what’s happening if you want to see the alien here. I could have done with less twenty-something relationship drama in the first thirty minutes, but it does give Rob emotional stakes to go back to the collapsing building for the finale. Not that that does him any good.
You're Next (2011)
Director: Adam Wingard
The super-rich Davisons are having a get-together for the first time in years at a remote family-owned mansion. Patriarch Paul has his favourites, but none of his children get along. One of his sons, Felix, brings girlfriend Erin to meet everyone for the first time. Nobody knows that a gang of masked intruders have just killed a couple in a nearby house and it looks like the Davison family are next.
I enjoyed this, but it is bleak, mainly because everyone apart from Erin, our heroine, is an awful person. Her secret ability to adapt and survive in the face of attack is surprising, then funny, and eventually unnerving as she brutally dispatches people with a variety of unlikely weapons.
It has notes from Home Alone, but I was more struck by its impact on films that came later, like Ready or Not, and 2022’s version of Scream. Is this the beginning of the trend towards final girls becoming as violent as their attackers?
Duel (1971)
Director: Steven Spielberg
I watched Duel dozens of time on television as a kid, as well as it’s rip-off cousin The Car, so it was a treat to revisit it. I certainly didn’t notice our hero’s crisis of masculinity back then, but that’s one of the gifts of middle age, I guess.
David Mann is a salesman driving across the California desert to an appointment that he can’t be late for. He passes a truck, but it immediately overtakes him back as soon as he slows down. Mann is forced into more and more dangerous maneuvers to stay ahead of the truck and its driver, who he begins to realise is playing a deadly game.
George Miller must have been inspired a little by this when he was making Mad Max eight years later. The chase scenes are always exciting, even when they stretch for several minutes across a monotonous desert landscape, which is testament to Spielberg’s direction. It’s mind-boggling to think this was his first film. He was twenty-four ffs.
Director: Dan O’Bannon
While showing a new employee around a medical supplies warehouse, manager Frank accidentally cracks open a military canister containing a chemical that can bring dead bodies back to life. The leak infects a corpse in the freezer which they manage to dismember and cremate, but the contaminated smoke falls on a nearby graveyard.
This is a high energy, gory teen comedy, with plenty of slapstick moments, just like Evil Dead 2, but it’s more of an ensemble piece than that. The punks hanging out in the graveyard are everything I wish I’d been as a teen — vibrant, trashy, horny, loud, and sometimes naked in public. The downside is that there’s too much shouted dialogue in small rooms.
Hidden in the chaos is a tragic moment when an undead woman, tied to a table, is asked why she needs to eat people’s brains, and she says it’s the only thing that eases the pain of being dead. Which broke my heart a bit.
Evil Dead 2 (1987)
Director: Sam Raimi
In the role he is most famous for, Bruce Campbell tears up the screen as Ash, a man who wanted to have a romantic weekend in the woods with his girlfriend, Linda, and is instead made to fight for his life against demon-possessed corpses. And trees.
It starts with a recording of a missing archaeologist reading mysterious words from The Book of the Dead. This summons a demon who quickly possesses Linda. When the professor’s daughter, Henrietta, arrives looking for her father, instead she finds a half-mad Ash covered in blood, and her undead mother in the cellar.
It’s showing its age and budget constraints, but this is more than made up for by the charisma of the cast, Raimi’s creativity with the camera, and a relentless pace that doesn’t let up. Ash’s transformation from awkward nerd via slapstick comedy and self-mutilation to action hero is one of the wonders of the horror genre.
Director: Tobe Hooper
Continuing my Tobe Hooper deep dive, Invaders from Mars takes us to small town America, a loving family, and a boy, David Carlsen, watching lights land in the field behind his home. Neither of his parents believe him, but the next morning his father has a cut on the back of his neck and is behaving strangely. Soon people all over town are doing the same and David is on the run.
Hooper is playing with a pastiche of black and white science-fiction films, but subverting it by having the aliens turn people into conformist fifties stereotypes instead of communists as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I wish it were shorter, less of a children’s film, and with a sharper ending — there’s too much shouting and running around. Karen Black as school nurse Linda has fun hamming it up when the impressively gross and made-with-practical-effects aliens appear. Fun fact: David was played by her real son, Hunter Carson.
I didn’t know Hooper did this pivot from horror into sci-fi. He signed a three-movie deal with Cannon after Poltergeist, of which Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars were the first two. I’m not sure I’ve got the will for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part 2.