Time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again.And so we did last weekend at the 666th Annual Ohio 24-Hour Horror Marathon and Back Pain Junkies' Convention/Kevin S. O'Brien Memorial Film Dump. Just like we had the year before, and the year before, and the year before. Just the latest chapter in this decades long saga of cinematic excess.
One of the great pleasures of the current incarnation of these events is that in addition to organizing things, Bruce and I essentially get to be audience members along with all of you, watching the films as they unspool, the DCPs as they unleash their complex strings of 1's and 0's, the faces of the crowd (or the backs of their heads) as they ooh, ahh, scream, grimace and express all emotions in between.
And it's because we share this kinship with the rest of you maniacs that we often notice things that we hadn't in the months leading up to the Marathon. Like secret, subconscious themes that we hadn't intended. The 2nd SHOCK AROUND THE CLOCK had mad scientists of all stripes populating its titles, but somehow we didn't quite get that until the night of the Marathon. The day of the 4th SHOCK AROUND THE CLOCK, we realized that most of the films dealt with doomed romances of one sort or another (read what you will into that.) And this year, it took me until the end of this all-night film boogie to realize that while people hiding in walls, or wearing hats, or worshipping evil deities might have snaked through the 24 hours, the biggest hidden theme involved trance states.
Like the flat circle of time, we keep repeating this Marathon tradition over and over, stuck in a collective trance with each other twice a year. After all, if athletic marathons require achieving a certain zen trance state in order to endure them, don't our Marathons also require a similar mindset to traverse their entire rotation of the planet? Long ago, I realized that the easiest way to stay awake for the entire 24 hours was to focus on the moment, not to look too far ahead or behind in the lineup, not to think too much about fatigue. It's a fitting mindset for an art form which is essentially an act of mass dreaming, in which we all suspend out ties to reality in order to gaze through that massive window in front of us into the lives of damsels in distress, axe murderers, vampires, werewolves.
So it's especially fitting that a 24-Hour Marathon was so steeped in trance state films. The endless repetition of Dwight Tilley's "Looking for the Magic" in YOU'RE NEXT, the trancelike pacing and soundtrack of NOSFERATU (then again, have Popul Vuh ever created music that isn't trancelike?), Susan Strasberg in THE MANITOU (hell, anyone in THE MANITOU), the bizarre meandering faux erotic tableaus of THE SATANIST, Sally Hardesty's nightmare screamathon in the Sawyer dining room in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE: all are states of zoned out repetition.
And what is THE SHINING but a film that's all about trance states? Danny taps into his shining by entering a fugue state (and there's also the theory about Tony being an alternate identity Danny creates to disassociate himself from Jack's abuse, a common tactic for victims of such.) The Overlook holds Jack in an extended trance, one that he wavers in and out of until finally giving in at the climax. For the first time in awhile, I noticed the extended closeups of characters' faces while they spoke, and how their often blank stares betrayed what was really going on behind the words they spoke. And the whole film takes the audience into a collective trance, playing around with concepts of time and place until you're not sure who is where or when. I tapped into some of this trance state this time, as I finally realized that, for me, watching THE SHINING is like being in the Overlook: there are so many intriguing scenes and locations that I don't want them to end. I could go on observing the party in The Gold Room for ever, and ever, and ever....
But perhaps the most obvious trance film was the Ohio Premiere of THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS. Most here know that I dig the avant garde films we sometimes show to no end, and Cattet and Forzani's latest was no exception. Narrative is often king at Marathons, but what truly scares/confounds/excites/inspires me in horror is what I can't explain, what often works on an almost primal level. What this directing duo have managed to accomplish in this and AMER is to tap into the audience's subconscious state, to provoke a reaction that's often not comfortable. I know that films like this aren't for everyone, but I found STRANGE COLOR to be an experience that I want to relive (albeit in reduced form on video) soon.
But all of this trance state talk obscures what was best, and decidedly non-trancelike, about this event: the renewed energy of the audience. I may have mentioned it at the end of the Marathon, but the wild enthusiasm the crowd exhibited for YOU'RE NEXT was one of the proudest moments that I've had as a booker. And the strong reactions for HOUSEBOUND and THE MANITOU were equally heartening. Even beyond that, you could just sense that everyone was fully engaged and committed to this collective experience that we were all undertaking, and in an age of increasing cultural isolation, being able to get jazzed like that with all of you was a truly awesome time. We may roll around the flat circle of time, but some of those repeating experiences are well worth doing over, and over, and over, and over.....