Pumpkin Person rating: 9/10

So I was in the very small town of Casselman, Ontario, just East of Ottawa, the other day.  Commenter JS might like this town, as the people there all seem to prefer to speak in French, though they know how to speak English for business purposes.

I stopped at a gas station and I noticed the film We need to talk about Kevin on sale for only $5.  I first heard of the film when actress Tilda Swinton promoted it on Charlie Rose.  Since Rose’s show focuses on intellectual topics, I figured the film might have some depth.  Always looking for quality horror and dark dramas to add to my collection, I snatched it up.

The film is about the typical high IQ highly educated liberal career woman named Eva (played by Swinton), who like so many smart women, is not very maternal, going through the struggle of having a baby.

Except in this case the adjustment to motherhood is way harder because the baby is born pure evil.  From birth it seems like the baby’s only purpose is to make his mother’s life hell on Earth.  For the first few months of life, he does nothing but scream all day long.  Then he refuses to talk, causing Eva to have him checked for autism.  The East Asian doctor concludes he’s perfectly normal.

Eva soon discovers the child is feigning developmental delays as a way of torturing his mother.  He pretends he doesn’t know any numbers, but secretly seems to have a genius IQ and can count to the stratosphere.  He pretends he can’t use a toilet, just to force Eva to change his diaper, well past the toddler years.  He sprays paint all over a bedroom she spent days decorating.

Yet around his father, and everyone else, he acts like a perfect little angel, thus demonizing Eva as a bad mother who doesn’t love her own son.

Once he becomes a teenager, is evil only hardens, but not even Eva can imagine the utter horror he will release on the town where he lives.

The film really deserved an Oscar, either for the excellent performance of Swinton, as the woman who hates being a mother, or the performances of Ezra Miller, as the teenaged Kevin, or Rock Duer or Jasper Newell who plays Kevin as a child. Newell was an incredibly precocious actor, and I appreciate how much he looks like Duer, who plays him as a toddler, and Miller, who plays him as an adolescent, and how much all three boys look like Swinton who plays the mother.  Clearly a lot of care went into the casting and makes the film that much more believable.

Interestingly Miller is half Ashkenazi, half white, but he looks half East Asian, half white.  Newell and Duer look similar, though I don’t know what their true background is.  Such a high IQ ethnic look makes the character’s genius more believable, as you see a lot of these Eurasian looking kids in classes for the gifted.

Kevin’s high IQ is also revealed through his constant sarcasm (seems common in high IQ boys) and clever dialogue.  In a scene where his mother discovers his collection of computer viruses, and asks what’s the point, he smartly replies, as some of you do:

“There is no point.  That’s the point”

In a scene where Kevin overhears that his mother doesn’t want custody of him when she divorces his father, the father tries to placate Kevin by saying the discussion was heard out of context.

“How could I not know the context,” Kevin replies. “I AM the context.”

I recommend this film for sophisticated realistic horror fans, who like real character development, and artsy non-linear story telling.

Today is Friday the 13th, so I thought I would blog about the 1980 film Friday the 13th, not to be confused with the vastly inferior remake by the same name released in 2009.  Friday the 13th was arguabley the most influential horror film of the last half century.  Not only did it spawn an entire franchise and the most iconic villain in horror history (Jason), but it popularized and revolutionized the slasher film genre. Some would say John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween was more influential, and indeed Halloween created the template and narrative structure that F13 would follow, but F13 took the genre to a whole new level of creative graphic violence.

Both Halloween and F13 benefited from being pioneers in their industry, and when you’re first, you get to pick the best.  So of all the notable calendar days on which to set a slasher film, Halloween is the best.  But while Halloween got the best chronological setting (Fall), F13 got the best location setting (the woods).  The film oozes with atmosphere, with the camera occasionally showing the full moon in the sky.

What made the original F13 so incredibly brilliant was how organic it was.  In a genre littered with contrived storylines, and ad hoc just-so plot devises, there was absolutely nothing contrived about this film.  The killer’s motives flows naturally, logically from the setting.  In other words, if you had to think logically about who would be motivated to kill off a bunch of camp counselors at a summer camp, you might imagine a killer like the one in this film.

Despite the killer being logical, there is fascinating irony in the killer’s identity, and then there’s a twist at the end that flows oh so naturally from the killer’s motive and the most brilliant segue to a sequel I have ever seen.  And what a sequel it is.  I strongly recommend watching both Friday the 13th (1980) and its direct sequel Friday the 13th part 2 (1981) in one evening.  For in the sequel, the iconic Jason emerges as the killer, and remains the killer for virtually the rest of the franchise.

Jason is a mentally retarded man who lives in the woods.  Some say he drowned as a child and came back from the dead.  Others say he never really drowned at all, but survived as a kind of feral child grown up.  This ambiguity is one of my favorite things about this franchise.  For the first several F13 movies, it’s up to the viewer whether Jason is human or whether he’s a supernatural undead villain.  Though by part 6, he clearly becomes the latter.

I actually think Jason’s much much scarier in the early films, when he’s arguably a real man.  Some say a real person would not just live like an animal in the woods, it makes no sense, but that’s the point: He’s mentally retarded, so it makes perfect sense that his behavior would make no sense.

When I was a little kid (I’m now in my 30s), they would show the first two Friday the 13th movies on TV all the time on Friday the 13th late at night, and when I was about 9, I waited  until my parents went to bed, snuck downstairs and watched the original F13.  For my generation, these films have great nostalgic value, not just because they played a part in our childhood, but because they are throwbacks to a simpler time.  Before the internet, before the “war on terror”, before NAFTA.

Sadly, these films also probably appeal to white nationalists because they are some of the last vestiges of white middle class America.  Is there anything more white than summer camp or Jason’s iconic hockey mask (a sport with virtually no blacks)?  Sadly, the original F13 did not have a single non-white character.

Not one.

It thus seems symbolic that in various sequels, Jason has resembled both a hooded KKK member and a skin head (see pictures below).  Indeed Jason had the same low IQ mentality in that just as a racist might hate all blacks because of bad experiences with a few blacks, Jason hates (and kills) all camp counselors because of the actions of just one.  Such overgeneralization is a major sign of low IQ because  the ability to correctly generalize is one of the most g loaded abilities, and it’s one of the reasons vocabulary is one of the most g loaded skills.  If you overgeneralize, it’s hard to learn words because you might mistakenly think the word “father” refers to all men, or that the word “bird” refers to anything that can fly, including airplanes.

Jason with the Ku Klux Klan look

Jason with the skinhead look

Pumpkin Person rating: 8/10

In honor of Mother’s Day, I though I would blog about the horror film Mother’s Day released in 1980, not to be confused with the uninspired 2010 remake by the same name.   The film is about a demented old lady who lives in a shack in the woods with her two mentally retarded sons, who brutalize unsuspecting campers to their mother’s delight.

The expected IQ of the mother of an IQ 60 son would be 82, but the expected IQ of a mother with two IQ 60 sons would be 76.  This of course assumes the sons’ retardation is familial and non-organic, which it was.  If the sons’ retardation was organic, she could could have three retarded sons in a row and her expected IQ would stay 100.

My hero Roger Ebert famously gave this film zero stars, condemning it’s vile sadism.  But today Mother’s Day is a cult classic.  A hidden gem.

I haven’t seen this movie since I was about 11 years old (I’m now in my 30s) but I remember it fondly and want to watch it again.

It is more than a horror film.  It’s also a poignant story about friendship.  The film starts three women who bonded in college and reunite years later and go camping in the woods and remember the good old days over the camp fire.  It is these women who are eventually stalked by the film’s villains.

You can watch this film on YouTube here, or the you can watch it in French here however please don’t watch it on your computer screen.  This film deserves to be watched on a big screen TV, so if you’re adaptable enough to do so, hook up your internet connection to your television before watching.

And please do not watch this film if you are under 21 because there is brutal violence, nudity, and sexually explicit content.

Mother’s Day is old school 80s horror at its best.

Vintage horror.

They don’t make horror like this anymore, and couldn’t if they tried.

Watch it with your mother. 🙂

Pumpkin Person rating: 8/10

Another quiet evening inside watching Netflix on a huge-screen high definition TV.  I decided to re-watch a film I saw a couple autumns ago: Silent House (2011), a U.S. horror film directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau.  A remake of  the 2010 Uruguayan film, La casa muda (The Silent House), supposedly based on true events that occurred in a village in Uruguay in the 1940s.

The film begins with a young woman (Sarah) and her dad at a beautiful isolated house overlooking a lake in the middle of fall, with leaves changing colors and scattered all over the lawn.  The father seems to be one of those “cool” American dads who is more like a peer than an authority figure.  He talks to her about her facebook profile and her dating life, but a lot of work is to be done.  They want to sell this old isolated house that they no longer live in, and now only seldom visit.

The dad’s brother, who is Sarah’s uncle also shows up, to help them get ready to move.  He’s a young cool uncle that Sarah is so happy to see and can relate to very easily.

But it’s very dark in the house because there’s no electricity.

The father goes downstairs, leaving Sarah and her uncle upstairs in the dark to bond.

And then something terrifying happens.

Sarah stands against the wall and he shines a bright flashlight on her.

“Look at you,” he says warmly.  “I can’t believe how grownup you are.”

And she just stands there, and stands there, and stands there… in the darkness of the room smiling under the gaze of her uncle, illuminated only by the flashlight.

This makes me incredibly disturbed.  It’s the first clue that we get that there’s something not quite right about this seemingly perfect suburban family.

A little later the doorbell rings and Sarah opens it.  It’s a mysterious young woman named Sophie.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” says Sophie sympathetically.  Apparently they were playmates when Sarah lived at this isolated house as a child.

Sophie wants to know what Sarah’s up to.  Is she in school? Is she working?  None of the above.  The two young women reconnect on the porch, overlooking the colored autumn leaves and the lake.  And then Sophie bikes off into the horizon, leaving Sarah alone in the secluded house with her dad and her uncle.

As the sun begins to set, mysterious and violent events occur in the house.

Is the house haunted?

I don’t want to spoil the ending, so all I will say is that although this film got mediocre reviews, it’s one of my favorite films of all time.  I loved the atmosphere, and was deeply moved by the uniqueness and sadness of the story.    If you’re an exceptionally sensitive person, this film will speak to you on a level far beyond the cheap scares.

Pumpkin Person rating: 7.5/10

Midway through my vacation, this evening I watched the 2014 horror film Death Do Us Part, directed by Nicholas Humphries, and written by Julia Benson, Ryan Copple, and Peter Benson.  The plot was kind of stupid, with one contrived twist after another, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Although they were aiming for a post-modern Scream style slasher film filled with comedy, all of the jokes fell flat, so you were left with an old school, humorless slasher film, which is what I prefer.  I don’t think horror and comedy should be mixed.  What I loved most about this film:

1. The setting: An incredibly isolated cabin deep in the woods with the ocean directly behind it.  The location was stunning and cozy and all the more beautiful on a big screen TV.  I kept trying to figure out where in the United States the film took place since it looked way too cold to be California, and I learned later it was set in Vancouver, Canada.

         2.  The cast: When I first started watching slasher films as a kid, all  the teenaged characters were years older than me, but now that I’m in my 30s, the characters are all younger than me.  Thus it was refreshing to watch a slasher filmer where the characters were generally in their 30s like me.  Not only were they mostly all around my age, but they were in the same stage of life as me: About to get married.  Indeed the film revolves around that one last weekend in the woods with friends, before you get married and life changes.

Commenter who goes by the pseudonames World Mustache Champion, Jorge Videla, Robert Mugabe etc wrote:

there’s only one horror movie worth watching.
all others are shit for prole retards.
of course 2001 and Dr Strangelove and Apocalypse Now might be classed as horrors by some…but i wouldn’t.
it was nominated for best picture before i was born.
it was re-released a few years ago (in theatres) and i went to see it.
that was The Exorcist.
peepee needs an exorcism.
the same director made the best picture winner The French Connection…a movie i hated when i was younger but loved when i was older

An excellent short clone of The Exorcist is Tales from the Darkside Season 2 Episode 9 The Trouble with Mary Jane:

It is true that the The Exorcist is one of the horror films that appeals to the higher social classes (though not exclusively so). Other relatively higher class horror includes:

Frankenstein (1931)

Psycho (1960)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Carrie (1976)

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Halloween (1978)

The Shining (1980)

Creepshow (1982)

Beloved (1998)

The Dark Hours (2005): I personally crowned this the greatest Canadian horror film of all time.

Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

The Strangers (2008)

With Halloween only hours away, I want to mention one of the smartest heroes in the history of slasher films:  Tommy Jarvis from Friday the 13th parts four, five and six.  If intelligence is the mental ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage, then you’d expect the sole survivor(s) of a slasher film, the one who turns the table on the killer and defeats him, to have a high IQ.

In the typical 1980s slasher film, you have about ten middle class, Midwesternish teenagers all being stalked by a killer and one sole survivor.  Assuming the sole survivor has the highest IQ in a group of 10 middle class whites, then we might (very crudely) say it takes an IQ of 120 (90 percentile) to survive the typical slasher film.

According to scholar Charles Murray, it takes an IQ of 120 to handle genuine college material.   So you can kind of think of surviving a slasher film as passing the SAT.  Both are the most terrifying test a teenager takes, and if you fail badly enough on either, you’re not getting into a good college.

The character of Tommy Jarvis, introduced in Friday the 13th The Final Chapter, not only survived a slasher massacre, but he killed the film’s hockey masked antagonist Jason.  And he did all this, despite being only 12.  So Tommy Jarvis is kind of like one of those super gifted kids who takes the SAT before high school and comes out with an IQ equivalent of 120.    But since the normal age for taking the SAT (or surviving a slasher film) is about 17, you must add bonus points for each year below the adult “mental age” of 16+.  Since 16/12 = 1.33, and 1.33 multiplied by an IQ of 120 is 160, Tommy gets an age ratio IQ of 160.

However because mental chronological development is not entirely linear (especially at the extremes) age ratio IQs give inflated IQs.  For example scholar Vernon Sare estimated that one in 1,170 (white) children have age ratio IQs of 160.  Thus, converting ratio scores to the modern normalized deviation IQ, young Jarvis clocks in at 147.

Of course one could argue that surviving a slasher film is a very poor measure of IQ because there are so many other variables involved (luck, courage, stress management, physical speed, coordination and endurance).  Further, the correlation between IQ and life span is only about 0.2, suggesting there’s a lot more to survival than just IQ.

Of course, the correlation between IQ and survival might be higher in the very controlled situation of a slasher film where split second decisions determine success, as opposed to real life, where one might die because of a disease or plane crash they have no control over or because of an addiction they can’t resist.

Perhaps a better measure of the correlation between IQ and survival success is the 0.4 correlation between IQ and income, since historically, acquiring resources meant survival.  Thus, if Tommy Jarvis has an IQ 47 points above the white mean of 100 when it comes to the slasher film’s Darwinian test of intelligence, he likely  47(0.4) = 19 points above average on an official IQ test (IQ 119).

The following clip shows how even though the killer Jason has the advantage of being vastly bigger and stronger than Tommy, Tommy has the adaptability (with some help from his big sis) to turn the situation around to his advantage (the essence of intelligence):

To get into the Halloween spirit, I’ve embedded one of my favorite horror shorts of all time below. It is Tales from the Darkside Season 2 Episode 20 A Choice of Dreams. I strongly advise you all to watch this short film some time before Halloween (you have almost a whole week. And watch it BEFORE YOU READ THE COMMENTS).

I often reference my high school chemistry teacher who taught me what intelligence really is: The cognitive ability to adapt–to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage. Some people don’t like that definition, because it reminds them more of an evil opportunist getting rich than a brilliant scientist doing truly genius work.

But as the Bible says, For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Thus, the opportunist who sells his soul to get rich has not really adapted the situation to his advantage to any huge degree. He either had no morals to burden him, and thus had an easy situation to adapt to, or his material pleasures are negated by the psychic pain of having ruined the lives of others.

The film below is about a rich mobster who got rich using some intelligence (his IQ is probably an above average score of 110) and a lot of evil (probably a psychopath). He is smart enough to adapt to a life of crime, but it takes a scientist with an IQ of probably above 170 to figure out away for him to adapt the situation to his advantage for all of eternity, which is infinitely more advantageous than a mere lifetime of wealth. And yet, the best and truest line of the video, is “never underestimate the power of money, kid”.

So defining intelligence as the ability to adapt is perfect, because not only did intelligence evolve to enable us to adapt, but both a common sense understanding of intelligence (if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?), and an academic image of intelligence (breakthroughs in science) are all about goal-directed adaptive advantageous behavior. As my chemistry teacher so eloquently explained, it’s the single umbrella that covers all of intelligence.