Month: August 2019

NecronomiCon 2019 and the New WIP

Last weekend was NecronomiCon 2019 in Providence, RI. This was my first time attending, though I have been reading about it for years. Up until this past year, I always considered myself more of a filmmaker and film scholar of the weird, so this more literary-focused event couldn’t compete for time and funds alongside the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, The Outer Dark Symposium, and other academic conferences that were a bit more central to my pursuit of tenure and promotion as a professor of film. This is a new path, though, and conferences like NecronomiCon, NECon, and ReaderCon are likely to be much more central to my writing life going forward.

I know I am hardly alone among my fellow authors in saying that I am not particularly good at cons. I want very much to be part of the group, or what looks like a group from the outside, but I am not a natural extrovert. I want to sit in a corner or a bar or a cafe and talk shop with people. I want to go to room parties, but I worry that I don’t belong, that I’m intruding. This anxiety was much easier to believe whole-heartedly when my primary accomplishments were as a screenwriter of some minor merit. Being a finalist several times over and even winning an award or two doesn’t confer a lot of credibility, because screenplays that don’t become films are largely invisible as accomplishments. Like scholarly essays, only a tiny number of people have actually read them.

Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows has changed that for me, both in my mind and in the minds of others to some extent. As a fiction writer, I came to this conference with a novel freshly out of the gate from a well-known and widely respected press. I not only got to meet authors I’ve admired from afar for years, but several of them had read my book, and they like it! It’s just crazy. It’s gratifying and motivating and…just wonderful. I want people to enjoy that book, but in a lot of ways, these are the people for whom I wrote it. They are the readers who I already know have a taste for this sort of thing. Most if not all fiction is part of a conversation, and these folks are absolutely my interlocutors. To be seen and recognized as one of them, literally and figuratively, is a genuine homecoming.

I set out to challenge myself at this con by doing my best to speak with people, to make new friends, and to praise the authors of stories I have enjoyed to their faces. I was able to do that, and it felt good. It’s far easier to thank people honestly for their art than it is to make small talk. That’s a good step forward, but I will try to do more next time. And the next opportunity comes soon.

In early October, I will be at this year’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Portland, OR at the Hollywood Theater, where this year’s Guests of Honor include Victoria Price (Vincent’s daughter), Roger Corman, and Richard Stanley with his new adaptation of The Colour Out of Space, starring Nicholas Cage! WTF? The HPLFF is a fine opportunity to pass through the veil and finally see what the room parties are all about.*

In the meantime, I am fully engaged in the beginning of the new work in progress (WIP). This novel has been popping up now and again in my daily writing practice (30 minutes, every morning, long-hand), but it has been amorphous for months. I had enough of a concept for there to be a pitch (which I am mostly keeping to myself for the moment), but a more solid grasp of character and plot and the nature of the weird at the heart of it all remained elusive until this past week. Though there was no one crystalizing moment, I expect that the atmosphere of NecronomiCon helped to push me in the right direction. So now I have consolidated all of those daily notes and I can see the vague outline now. I start to know the people in this story. I can smell the fresh water of Lake Michigan and the murkier darkness that clings to the shore near the mouth of the river.

* Full Disclosure: I did actually go to a room party at the very first HPLFF I ever attended in 2003, but there was absinthe and pleather and I only remember flashes of it. Now that I think of it, it’s entirely possible that I never made it out of that room…

A Clockwork Caméra-Stylo

In Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows, Tina Mori steals a wind-up Super 8 film camera from a professor of Russian language and literature. This is the camera she uses to make all of her early films. But it’s not a cursed camera or anything like that. It’s a little weird maybe, but it’s certainly not supernatural.

The Soviet Union manufactured hundreds of thousands of these and other motion picture cameras. The first I ever owned was the 16mm Krasnogrosk K-3 motion picture kit, and the Super 8 Zenit 1x8C-2 and its kin are like younger siblings. Now I have four or five of them. Yes, I have a problem.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, these cameras have flooded secondary markets like eBay, where you can routinely find them for sale at bargain prices. These are quite often barely used if at all, especially if they are being sold from the Ukraine or Belarus. I imagine gigantic warehouses of 30-year-old camera kits just waiting to find homes with nostalgic hobbyists.

But I think nostalgia isn’t quite right, either. Kodak still manufactures Super 8 film (it is even bringing back a limited selection of discontinued film stocks, though not Kodachrome as yet), and they are famously attempting to reintroduce a hybrid Super 8/digital motion picture camera for today’s consumers.

There are also companies like Pro8mm, who not only sell Super 8 film and processing (including conversion to digital files for editing and output), but they also refurbish cameras into like new or better condition. There are also still film labs that process these smaller gauge formats, though certainly far, far fewer than in decades past.

While Kodak’s new camera is a hybrid of digital and analog technology, the Zenit Super 8 camera is almost entirely, doggedly, brutally analog (it does have a battery-powered internal light meter). While most of the Super 8 cameras that people bought in the U.S. and Western Europe and elsewhere had battery-powered motors and were made mostly of plastic, the Zenit is a lot of die cast metal and heavy composites. It’s weighty. To give you a better sense of it, here’s a short YouTube review of the 1x8S-2 (which is the version of the camera that was sold outside the USSR under the market name Kinoflex). The reviewer is German.

Aside from always delicate lenses, these cameras are virtually impossible to break during normal use. That’s certainly not the case with a lot of old Super 8 camera that you might have bought at the local department store or camera shop. And they can do everything except synchronized sound.

All of this tends to inspire romantic people like me (who wrote Memento Mori on a manual typewriter–no Delete key!). Why not make a movie with one of these? Many, many aspiring filmmakers still find their way to Super 8 as a filmmaking format either out of a retro sensibility, or an appreciation of film’s discipline over digital, or a sincere love of the small gauge film visual aesthetic. Of course, since each cartridge is only about three minutes of footage at normal speed, most of these films are short. In fact, there is an annual global competition called Straight8 that challenges filmmakers to make a short film in Super8 with all in-camera editing (go the page, check out some classic samples, ZOMG). That is, you don’t get to edit anything after the fact. You shoot each shot in order, send off the cartridge, and hope it all worked out! Here is Edgar Wright’s amazing Straight8, Forced Hilarity, which Wright introduces.

But others have been even more ambitious, if not more successful. Here is John Hand on trying to shoot in feature film on Super 8 in the 21st Century. Another guerrilla project, Buster, managed to do the Super 8 feature thing, as well.

All of these things, along with the decades-long history of home and amateur film enthusiasts that I have read about extensively, my own experiences growing up watching the Hauser family home movies on 8mm film (and inheriting many of them recently), and my more recent interest and research in the underground film scene contributed to the creation of Tina Mori’s obsession.

Next time, I’ll introduce you to that underground film world. But until then, do you have any memories of watching celluloid home movies? How is that experience, or your memories of that experience, different from the cellphone video that we see everywhere all the time now? I want to hear what you think.