the Richard Larson blog

LOST! (still obsessed...)

"At the heart of any time travel story is one kernel of an idea: Can you change the future?"

Zoe's Tale

My review of John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale has been posted at Strange Horizons.

Dragons!

The giant lizards had been waiting for him under the tree...

Stories like this are particularly terrifying because they literalize the metaphors that fantasy and horror fiction perpetuate -- ideas of big, larger-than-life creatures, vaguely out of control, which threaten to destroy us as punishment for our various sins (over-population, poor utilization of the natural world, etc). If the current economic recession has forced anyone formerly employed by the finance industry into a career as an apple-picker in Komodo, let this serve as a testament to the fact that no matter where you go -- lower Manhattan or an island filled with vicious, poisonous dragons (I think we're onto something here) -- there will always be someone waiting beneath a tree to eat you.

Coming soon!

The Last House on the Left

I went to a press screening last week of the remake of Wes Craven's brilliant '70s vigilante/family horror film The Last House on the Left, and while I don't understand a few of the changes from the original and I absolutely hated the film's closing moments (a needlessly gratuitous splatter killing), it was a genuinely worthwhile remake, capturing the urgency of the original's message while layering the story more successfully with tension and, perhaps more surprisingly, emotion. While I feel that the two major changes (*) are likely the result of producers worrying that the film would be too bleak for mainstream audiences, I still left the theater feeling like Hollywood has finally given something back to serious horror fans. Also, I may just not be remembering this aspect of Craven's original, but I really enjoyed the way class plays out in Dennis Iliadis's remake; the good, innocent family at their country home is coded as decidedly rich and privileged, while the roving criminals harbor an obvious resentment towards wealth (at one point the only woman in the "bad family" makes verbal assumptions about the girls they have kidnapped, saying something along the lines of "Girls like you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth"). The fact that the poor are driven to criminal activity based on social circumstances is a tangible force here, and when they are driven back and destroyed by the privileged class, there is a sense, however brief (as the criminal acts are truly horrendous and shocking), that something has gone terribly wrong in the fabric of the American class system when we are rooting for the resumption of the seemingly "natural" distribution of privilege.

* Mary, the film's original tragic victim, survives here, allowing for a wrenching moment as her father (a doctor, already treating her for a gunshot wound) realizes that she has been raped. Also, Justin, the young man in the "bad family," turns on his father's influence in this remake and is then rescued by Mary's parents, whereas the original film sees him as permanently corrupted, ending up as collateral damage in the struggle between good and evil.