After a long period of inactivity, due to illness and other things that came up, we finally got back to filming this past weekend. The scene was meant to be shot during the peak of foliage season, but that ended up not happening, because of a schedule conflict.

Fortunately, we were able to get out into the conservation area before we'd completely lost the season to shoot one of our last three dream sequences. The sun wasn't very cooperative, slipping behind the clouds more often than I wanted, but overall the footage looks good.

On the downside, we had a lot of trouble with sound, due to the fact that I couldn't get the microphone close enough to Rob and David, for a number of shots, and we encountered the same problem with crunching leaves we'd run into in the first film. I had the boys record their lines when they weren't moving, in case I can use that for dubbing, but it may not prove useful.

The other issue we ran into was the fact that the camera batteries didn't last as long as I remember them lasting - perhaps because it was pretty cold. So, we ended up rushing more than I felt comfortable with. But I think we got everything, and the performances were good.

October 1st

"Pick-ups" is the term for shots that need to be re-done later, either because they didn't come out right the first time, or because they were missed. One of the day-time scenes Rob and Kymra and I shot ended up having some problems, largely because I failed to notice that green grass was showing through the windows - the scene was supposed to take place in January!

Fortunately, it was only a couple shots of Rob. Kymra's shots were all fine. So Rob and I spent the early afternoon re-doing them, then threw in a couple new ones for good measure.

Scheduling conflicts are slowing things down a bit right now. We're over the half-way mark for the film, but we need to make sure we get all the shots we need in the Fall, before we lose the foliage.

September 17th

I found out the week previous that my mother had been admitted to the hospital with a very serious condition involving blood-flow to her left foot. There was even the possibility that it would have to be amputated! So Erich and I drove down to see her.

Fortunately, she was doing much better, when we got there, having had some surgery to improve the blood-flow, and was now recuperating at home.

Monday evening, however, as I worked with Kymra and Rob to film the remaining scenes in the Derry House dining room (the housemates are itching to paint the walls), I felt like crap. Initially, I tried to brush it off and concentrate on the scenes, but by late evening, I had a very high fever. I ended up spending the rest of the week out of commission with some kind of flu and a fever that kept peaking at 103.

We did at least finish the scenes we needed to, although Kymra now blames me for passing the flu along to her!

September 8th and 9th

I won't spoil it for those who haven't read the screenplay, but lets just say it involved lots of fake blood, milk-colored gelatin and sausage skins. Marian Walke, Jamie Picon and Jay Cross (our recently re-cast Chief Lewis) spent most of Sunday filming, after a brief rehearsal on Saturday.

The entire scene was shot by the light of a large flashlight, with the exception of a few shots of Jay, which had to be faintly illuminated with a grayish light, so we could see his face - he was the one holding the flashlight. I haven't had time to edit the footage together yet, but I've reviewed it, and it looks great.

Our biggest problem was making sure Marian wasn't exposed to Jamie's cats for too long - she's very allergic to them. We basically got her into make-up outside, bustled her in for her shots, then let her escape, before her allergies kicked in.

*** Contains Spoilers! ***

Critics have been slamming this film, and so have die-hard John Carpenter fans. Since I'm sick to death of remakes, and loathed Rob Zombie's film "House of 1000 Corpses", I expected to hate it, as well. But there seemed to be an odd disconnect between what the critics were saying and the box office figures, which are decent, if not stellar. Also, users on rottentomatoes.com and IMDB are rating the film moderately highly.

So I went to see it yesterday. And I loved it.

Certainly, the film has flaws, but many of the so-called criticisms I've heard turned out, in my opinion, to be the film's strengths. About half of the film takes place BEFORE the events depicted in the original 1978 film, showing us Michael Meyers as a young boy and his descent into becoming a psychopathic killer. While this seems to be the main point that fans of the original film hate -- and I do mean HATE -- many of those who like the film (myself included) consider it to be the most interesting part of the film.

Yes, I'm a big fan of the original. I've been re-watching the classic horror films lately, being disappointed in the dreck Hollywood has been putting out, and "Halloween" is one of the few from that time period that I think really still stands up to serious scrutiny. (How anyone ever thought the original "The Hills Have Eyes" was frightening is completely beyond me.) But I don't worship Michael Meyers. I don't lay awake at nights, fearing that someone will create a movie that "ruins" him. All of this "destroying an icon" crap that people keep wailing simply irritates me.

Seeing the origin of Michael Meyers was, to me, fascinating. I went through a phase of being fascinated with serial killers when I was in college, and read a lot about Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the like. And what I read convinced me of one thing - serial killers are not made. They are born. The early history of many of them shows them to be disturbed at a very young age, often torturing and killing animals in secret as young children. Yet, they frequently have siblings who are raised almost exactly the same way, yet these siblings exhibit none of this behavior. Yes, they might have family troubles - abusive parents, perhaps (although often not), difficult childhoods (although divorce and family arguments are hardly adequate explanations, in this case) - but millions of other kids grow up in similar circumstances WITHOUT become psychopathic killers. Upbringing isn't the whole puzzle.

Similarly, I don't think Rob Zombie's depiction of Michael's troubled childhood is an EXPLANATION of what he later becomes. Michael is clearly psychotic from the first moment we meet him. He simply APPEARS to be an innocent child. His home life is pretty awful, and he's bullied at school, but this is not adequate as an explanation. It simply serves as background detail.

When young Michael crosses the line from killing animals to killing his first human being, it is truly horrifying. The scene is the best in the film, depicted with stark brutality, in an incredibly realistic fashion. Not gory - the critics who lamented the gore in this film were apparently so shocked by the brutality of some of the killings that they saw something that isn't there. This film is bloody. We see gallons of it. But very little else. (I think there was one decapitation scene.) What is shocking is hearing this ten-year-old boy screaming in rage, as he hacks over and over again at someone with a knife or a branch or a baseball bat.

After killing a nurse in the asylum (which always seems oddly empty of anyone but Michael, Dr. Loomis and a few guards), Michael withdraws completely and stops speaking. As he grows older, he becomes obsessed with hiding his face behind masks, and he is allowed to wile away his time making disturbing masks reminiscent of Leatherface. Unfortunately, as Michael stops speaking, he becomes less interesting. By the time he escapes (in a rather implausible scene), the film has descended into the standard slasher film formula.

Another element of the story that is upsetting fans of the original film is that Michael Meyers occasionally shows elements of humanity, even as an adult. Admittedly, not much. But when he kills his family, as a child, he spares his mother, who treats him kindly, and his baby sister. And when he returns to his childhood home, now abandoned, to seek out Laurie Stroud, we discover that she is his baby sister. After his mother committed suicide, she was adopted by the Stroud family. And when he first kidnaps her, Michael is tender towards her - until she screws it up by stabbing him. (Although you can hardly blame her.)

This variation of the original film storyline has fans frothing at the mouth. Frankly, I don't care. Within the context of the Zombie film, it works perfectly well. (Although how he managed to track her down is completely glossed over - presumably, he simply recognized her somehow.)

As we plod through killing after killing in the second half, the film does get a little tedious. I happen to believe this of most slasher films, but that's beside the point. John Carpenter did handle this part of it better. But the ending, I think, redeems the new film. After Laurie is trapped in the empty swimming pool behind the Meyer house, in a scene which I think is suspenseful, despite rants that Rob Zombie was able to elicit no suspense in the film whatsoever, we go through a fairly stock crawling-through-the-walls-as-the-villain-breaks-holes-in-it sequence (I can't remember the first time I've seen this, but it doesn't provide much punch for me), ending with Laurie and Michael plummeting out of the upstairs window together.

I won't completely ruin the ending, except to say that the last minute or so made the movie for me. (Well the first murder was pretty memorable, too.) It's the most realistic reaction to being chased and tortured all night by a psychopath that I've ever seen in a slasher film, and I think it's perfect.

I don't think the film is fantastic, but it's pretty good. The hand-held camera work is generally very effective, although it often started to give me a headache, when I was watching it. And it had an intensity which too many horror films lack these days.

Lastly, the film struck me as sexist, with women's breasts everywhere and not a single naked man in sight. I appreciate that Zombie is a heterosexual male and this is what heterosexual males like, and it's also a staple of slasher films. But there were at least two or three scenes in which men and women were having sex - together, in fact - and the camera really seemed to be going to great lengths to AVOID showing us any male nudity, so we could focus on the women. That's the point at which it gets silly, to me. If two people are having sex in a scene, they should both be naked. Even if you assume (wrongly) that no gay men will be watching the movie, a good percentage of the audience is female, so why be so one-sided?

At David's suggestion, we went back to Kristen Randall's barn last night, to get some pick-up shots of his character looking more "ghostly" than it had, when we filmed a scene there this Winter.

Unfortunately, "ghostly", in this context, translates to "naked, covered in blood" - the key word here being "naked". And while this seemed like a reasonable idea two or three weeks ago, when it was in the eighties, the temperature had dropped considerably last night.

So, once again David had to endure being completely doused in fake blood in cold weather, trying to stop shivering whenever the camera was rolling. No, it wasn't as cold as when we filmed the ritual scene two years ago in December, and we decided to forego the collodion he hates so much, but just the same, it was probably a good thing he didn't have a machete, this time.

His parting words, around midnight, were, "Goodnight...and don't ever make me do that again."

This particular scene came out well the first time we shot it, but people complained that David seemed too corporeal, so we've done reshoots of various parts twice now, attempting to change that. Plus we have yet to film the final shot. I'm hoping to get that done tonight.

I've downloaded the footage we shot last night, but it's going to take some work to find the exact shots we want to use from it and see what the final effect is. Hopefully, it will be worth it.

On Saturday, Erich, Rob, David and I trekked out into the college woods to film one of the dream sequences.

It was a fair hike, even along the broad, even paths that have been added since I was a student there. The university hasn't gone so far as to pave them, but they're covered with gravel in several places, making the forest feel much less wild than it used to.

I find this sad, in a way, but I can't deny that it was convenient. We were carrying the camera bag, microphone and a heavy tripod, so climbing over rough terrain would have been unpleasant.

It was a beautiful, sunny day, for the most part, but clouds kept rolling in, from time to time. This, along with the too-frequent noise of airplanes (from where, I don't know - maybe heading to Pease), proved to be a major pain in the butt.

The scene is a confrontation between David and Jonathan in the dream/fantasy world that Jonathan has created for himself. I needed woods with large, old trees, as opposed to the thin, shrub-like trees you find in so many New Hampshire woods (at least, this far South). The UNH college woods are the oldest that I know of, in this region, with beautiful old trees, huge gnarled roots and big slabs of granite jutting up out of the forest floor. It was perfect.

We even found the moss-covered river bank that the screenplay called for. Unfortunately, this appears to have been underwater sometime within the past year or so, because there was dried-out river refuse drapped over most of the branches near it. But once I cleared this away, it looked nice. The river itself is supposedly clean - it feeds directly into the reservoir - but doesn't look it. It's very brown and murky. But I didn't focus on it.

Our main problem, was getting our shots while we had sunlight spilling on the actors - not an easy feat, considering how fast it kept coming and going, with the wind blowing the clouds by overhead. And of course, we lost several takes to the noise of the plane engines.

Ultimately, we got everything we needed for David, but completely lost the sun, by the time we'd turned the camera to face Rob. The result, when I edited it together, was surreal, in an unpleasant way - it looked as if they were in two completely different places.

So, yesterday (Monday), Rob and I trudged back out there to re-shoot his dialog. It was even more of a hike than before. UNH was a vile, mercenary institution when I was a student there, and it's only gotten worse. They would charge for air on campus, if they could find a way to do it, and parking is completely forbidden during the week, without paying them for permits. The closest we could get to the entrance to the woods (at least, the one I was familiar with) was to park at the far end of the athletics fields and carry our equipment through fields and woods for about twenty minutes. Rob even got to play Indiana Jones, balancing precariously on a log to cross a muddy riverbed, while I stood callously by on the opposite bank, attempting to broaden his horizons by giving him a lecture about "Koyaanisqatsi", Philip Glass and "Einstein on the Beach". (It's a wonder he didn't throw himself into the river right there, just to make it stop.)

Eventually, we reached the college woods proper, then continued on for another twenty minutes or so to the shooting location.

It was more of the same, battling clouds and airplane noise, but eventually we got the footage we needed and trekked back. Fortunately, my car was still there - I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been discovered and towed, and possibly sold - and we escaped without further mishap.

After I'd just finished editing the scene in which Laura and Jonathan have their big argument (which came out terrific), we headed over to the Rice Public Library, in Kittery, Maine, to film Laura (Kymra) being further assailed by the crotchety old Mrs. Westcott over some overdue book fines.

The library itself is a beautiful building, dating back to 1888, with a semi-circular check-out desk and stacks that are accessed by ladders on brass runners. Claire helped me negotiate the use of the space for this scene, and I couldn't have found a more perfect setting.

Mrs. Westcott was played by Marian Walke, whom I had only corresponded with through e-mail, up to this time. Fortunately, she was perfect for the part and played it wonderfully! She was somewhat disconcerted to learn that I'd been filming, when she thought we were still rehearsing, but I don't see any reason to let possibly good takes vanish into the ether, when miniDV tapes are dirt cheap.

This also marked the first time that Jamie Picon (playing Tom Westcott) and Claire (Mrs. Henniker) appeared on camera. Both were great. It was interesting to see how Mrs. Henniker, a role I'd written with Sherry Mitsui in mind, changed in Claire's hands. She is still stern and proper, but somehow she seems less severe and a bit more in control. (Sherry was unable to join us this time around, due to her work schedule, but she's still a supporter of the project.)

This was also the first time Lily (Sarah) had lines, I believe, and Lily did a fine job with them, playing it a bit less "perky" than I'd originally envisioned, after Lily pointed out the absurdity of Sarah being bubbly and cheerful, less than two months after the death of her son. (We get to explore this better in some upcoming scenes.)

I've edited a rough cut of the scene together and I think it's great. Some of Kymra's reactions to the Westcotts and Mrs. Henniker made me laugh out loud, the first time I saw them in the context of the scene.

Everyone in the country appears to love this movie and think it's scary. I guess I'm too jaded - I thought it was a string of tired movie cliches that made little sense. Sure, it had it's moments and a few really made me jump, the cinematography worked well in places, and the acting was good (don't even get me started about the crappy CGI, though).

But on the whole, it wasn't very scary. For the most part, I kept waiting for the REALLY scary things to happen...and they never did.

I've begun to notice that the major difference between American horror and Japanese (or Asian, in general) horror, which I often find very scary, is that American horror likes to shock you with something jumping out at you, accompanied by a loud noise (this actually works well for us in "The Sacrifice" - most people love the "zombie hands" scene, even if they don't care for the rest of the film), whereas Asian horror likes the idea of something nasty slowly walking or
crawling across the room towards you.

They have their own cliches, which are getting a bit tiresome - long black hair creeping out of things, ghosts walking (or crawling) with disjointed or jerky movements, pretty much the same blueish ghost make-up on EVERY ghost we encounter - but I have to say I find Asian horror to be much more frightening than American horror. I'm often squirming in my seat, as the horrid thing on screen slowly inches towards the camera,
wanting to get away from it as much as the cast of the film does.

Something jumping out at me gets my heart racing for a second, and there is a certain amount of tension that builds up, because you don't know when the NEXT thing is going to jump out at you. But too frequently, what jumps out isn't all that frightening, after all - it's the jump and the loud noise that the filmmaker is counting on to scare me, and I no longer really fall for it.

I also found it disheartening that so many fans attacked the few critics who seemed to notice that "1408" makes no sense, insisting that movies about the paranormal don't HAVE to make sense. Huh? Good movies make sense, even if they're cryptic upon first viewing - "Donnie Darko", "The Shining" (the Kubrick version), these movies make sense, when you really look at them. Even if you never feel that you quite get it, you should at least feel that there is something there to get - something hiding below the surface that may be eluding you, but that you feel is there, nonetheless.

Note that these fans weren't defending "1408", saying that it DOES make sense, on some level - they were defending lazy filmmaking. They were, in essence, saying that they were perfectly willing to slap down their ten bucks for a film that's badly structured and make excuses for the writer and director, rather than demand better films. It's horror. It doesn't have to be good - it just has to have things jumping out at us.

Ugh.

A couple Sundays ago, we filmed the scene at the "abandoned" Corwin House, using our friend Robert Stiefel's 19th-century house for the setting.

This was not the Corwin House we see in the first film. That was supposed to be the old eighteenth-century Corwin farmhouse, which had been abandoned in the forties. This is supposedly the house in which Eli and David were living in town. It's been empty for just seven weeks, so although our hero finds some nasty food on the table, the house otherwise doesn't look unusual.

The big trick was the mysterious black cat that Jonathan sees dart up the stairs. Ken brought his cat, Bud, to play the part, and the old admonishment never to work with water, children or animals on a film proved true, once again. Poor Bud was terrified in his new surroundings, and the more he got prodded to run up the stairs, the more he tried to dart into the living room and hide. Not even the laser pointer could entice him up those stairs.

Eventually, though, we got our shots and Bud was able to go home and recuperate from his traumatic film career (until the next time we need him).

The other minor disaster was a misplaced microphone. Fortunately, the microphone on the Canon is nearly as good as the Sennheiser (at least, to my ear), so we filmed the scene with the panasonic DVX 100, but recorded sound with the Canon.