Hello and welcome, friends. This month, I’ve got a cool new cover for you. On top of that, I’ve Alien on the brain, so I wanted to take a little time to explore what makes the premiere Sci Fi/Horror Franchise work so damn well. Finally, we move through the deck of Dreams in the Punk House with “The Emperor,” wherein Casey must entertain Dave’s cop brother.
News
This week, the folks over at Terrorcore Publishing revealed the cover for their upcoming anthology, Doors of Darkness II. This collection of spooky stales centers on Halloween night as experienced by one, very cursed, suburban street. I’m also proud to say that it contains my story “House Lights,” which follows a kid obsessed with musical theater as he explores the boundaries of what he really knows about his family’s religion.
Be on the lookout for preorders to open up soon!
Non-Fiction
Deep Dive: What Makes Alien tick
Later this month, we will be blessed with a brand new entry in the Alien franchise. Since the initial trailer of Alien: Romulus, fans of sci horror have put out a kind of cautious optimism as this flick seems to return to the roots of the series, complete with retrofuturistic cassette tech and a much more visceral take on the xenomorph than the last couple of films.
To make sure I was ready, I’ve been working my way through the first six movies in the series, not to mention a bunch of other tie-in media, from games to books and on and on. In the course of my adventures, I’ve identified a few things in the Alien series that help explain why the horror works as well as it does. As a horror writer, it can be helpful to pull back the curtain and see how others have drummed up effective scares.
Isolation
The first thing Alien has going for it is given up right away in the tagline. “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.” Outer space is the most hostile environment imaginable. Ships, space stations, space suits, and other technology make it possible to travel through space, but technology is delicate. It can break. The long distances that have to be covered by communications, let alone by people, mean that space builds a sense of isolation. A distress call may blare into the void forever without getting picked up, and if it does, help is slow to come. There’s no place to run. Simply placing the action on a ship in the first movie, or in a derelict colony in the second, raises the stakes to an immense degree. The third makes a valiant effort to go even further: no one is in much hurry to stage a rescue on a prison planet. Isolation, cutting off means of escape, is an essential aspect of horror.
Oddly, this might be one of the things that undercuts a bit of Resurrection’s energy. While there is an initial drive to escape the station, the fact that it’s headed back toward earth changes the stakes. Rather than merely trying to escape, they want to destroy it so the alien can’t reach earth. These stakes aren’t that clear, however. Why not wait for the station to dock and then notify the marines? Since they can crash it, why not stop the return altogether? By contrast, the video game Dark Descent opens with a system wide quarantine measure to stop anything from getting in or out of the system. This creates a clear complication to escape as well as a fresh obstacle before backup can arrive.
Pulse Rifles, Nukes, Knives, Sharpened Sticks
The first film makes a lot out of the fact that the aliens bleed acid. A lot of horror lore serves to get ahead of questions that begin with the phrase, “Why don’t they just. . .?” If the fact that they’re in space nullifies the question, “Why don’t they just run?” then the acid blood nullifies the question “Why don’t they just shoot it?” This situation gets only more dire in the sequel, Aliens, when a number of Colonial Marines do, in fact, just shoot the aliens. It goes poorly. By that film, we’ve also established that the aliens operate in swarms, meaning that the marines are being charged by potentially thousands of acid-blooded monsters. This severely limits the tactics that you can use to fight. Much like a slasher who won’t go down to mere bullets, this limitation adds a terrifying layer to the fight.
Another theme introduced in the first film and elaborated in the second is what exactly the aliens do to you. Getting eaten or clawed to death is bad enough, but that isn’t what’s in store for most victims. Kane is attacked by a facehugger from an egg in the first movie. It impregnates him with the alien, which then bursts out of him in spectacular fashion. Being violated in this way, and then killed as an alien you’ve been gestating bursts from your chest is far worse than what they feared the alien might do initially. Aliens carries this further, revealing that the aliens actually capture anyone they can with the intention of impregnating them later. This comes to a head in a harrowing scene where one such victim begs for death just before giving “birth.” This theme goes by the wayside in the third film, only to be, uh, resurrected in the fourth, when Ripley encounters a doctor who is not only being saved for later, but seems to have been granted some insight into what the queen is planning.
They Think We’re Crud
One might wonder how people keep getting caught in the crosshairs of these aliens over and over again, and the answer is that they don’t know they exist. Many books, movies, and games begin with the premise that the player knows more than the characters do. Knowledge of the xenomorphs is kept confidential, and because the colonies are so spread out, rumors are slow to spread. The reason for this is simple: Weyland-Yutani, the company that owns the ship from the first film, wants to keep them secret so they can get their hands on them. They’ll do anything if it gets them the specimen they want.
Anything, including wiping out whole ship crews and colonies. If space can’t care, the systems at play in the Alien franchise choose not to. Weyland-Yutani and other corporations care about profit more than anything else, and are happy to leave a bloody trail in pursuit of it. This extends to the individual level, since in Aliens we see Carter Burke trap Ripley and Newt in a room with a facehugger. The problem is that even if anyone does care, the corporations keep vital info from the Colonial Marines. Only private companies and powerful governments have the resources to explore and settle deep space, but Weyland-Yutani is so much more capable of it that the marines are playing catch up.
Game Over, Man
What’s critical, and worth considering for our purposes, is not just the fact that these factors exist to make these movies scary, but that they all reinforce one another. Trapped in space, effectively owned by a corporation, with nowhere to run, no one coming to save you, and the thing chasing you doesn’t just want to kill you, it wants something worse. Despite the fact that some people know about these horrors, and in fact may be sending you headlong into them on purpose, you have no way of knowing what you signed up for when you took this job.
This feedback loop is so elegant that even though most media in the franchise, including books and video games, follows a handful of similar beats, it never grows stale. There are always new ways to explore the horrors, whether that’s foregrounding the issue of bodily violation, or by making the primary threat the corporation. Because each theme reinforces the others, the tension around all of them ratchets up at the same time.
Ultimately, it hits all the points that good horror ought to. Our heroes are isolated from help, and the help that might come might actually be dangerous. They fear death, but they also fear a fate worse than death. They’re in this situation because they didn’t have all the facts, but solving the mystery is cold comfort. No amount of bravado and swagger will help them. In the end, the only thing that saves anyone in Alien is a grim determination to do whatever it takes to survive. For many, that still isn't enough.
Fiction
The Emperor
Dave’s brother looked at the wall, at the koozie, at the floor, pretty much anywhere except for at Casey. He took a sip of beer through his little mustache and grimaced.
“So, yeah, I don’t know,” Casey said. “I think Dave should be back soon, he’s at work, maybe.”
“That’s okay,” the older man said. His eyes stayed on a spot a few feet up from Casey’s head. “Kind of an odd poster up there.”
Casey followed his gaze to the wall. A sheet of pink paper clung to the wall with blue tape. The stark design bore a xeroxed collage of competing shapes and figures, all selected because they were in the process of screaming. Ali made it, he thought. Emblazoned above a list of band names were four letters.
“Yeah, I guess it is. Our roommate made it, you know. How was the ride in from Kenosha?” Casey asked.
“What does K-C-S-W stand for?” For the first time, the man’s eyes landed right on Casey’s. Okay, so Dave mentioned that his brother was a cop, but was he like a cop cop or was it one of those situations where someone works as a bouncer and Dave’s like, “He’s a bar cop”? Dave thought everyone was a cop of some kind. Either way, the sport clips haircut and the polo shirt told Casey that this man would not resonate with that four letter message.
Kill Cops, Smoke Weed.
“KC– what? Where do you see it?” Casey pretended to scan the wall. “Oh! On the top of the poster! Uh, it stands for Kansas City. . . Swim Walk.” The words were barely out of his mouth before other, much better answers flooded his brain. Kansas City South West, KC (Casey) Spins. . . something.
“Swim Walk?”
“It’s like a run/walk, but with swimming,” Casey said.
“It’s like. . . what?”
“It’s an inside joke,” Casey said. “Do you want any chips or anything?”
“No, I’m okay. Say, do you mind if I hit the head?”
Casey pointed the way to the bathroom, and the man set his koozied beer down on the coffee table, making sure it wouldn’t tip one way or another. Instead of worrying about what posters in there may require explanation, Casey pulled out his phone.
“Dave, where r u? Bro is here” A few seconds later his phone buzzed.
“Hes early, jst wait. Im coming”
The toilet chugged as it flushed, and as it released a sigh and refilled the tank, the man sauntered back in. His eyes, cold and sharp, scanned the room.
“Yeah, so Dave says he’s on the way,” Casey ventured.
“You guys do your shows down in the basement right?” he asked. He leaned casually in the doorway.
“Well, yeah, we do.”
“Do you mind if I go down there, see what it’s like?”
Casey’s mind flashed on the backdrop currently hanging behind the area where the bands played. A tattered and torn American flag, with clear scorch-marks visible along the sides and in the middle, showing the places fire had damaged but had not quite managed to take hold, hung on the concrete wall.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, I mean, I’m sure Dave would rather show you around.”
“Right, Dave.” His eyes locked on Casey’s again. “But you know, it’s such a big part of his life, and I don’t really know a lot about what he gets up to here. I’m just wondering if you’d show me a little.”
Was there a way to scramble down the stairs and pull down the flag before Dave’s brother made it down? Probably not. Maybe Casey could compose some kind of reason that it was like that, something to play to this man’s patriotic nature.
“Which door is it?” he asked.
Casey led him into the corridor and opened the basement door. He flicked on the light, and the two of them peered down at the wooden staircase and concrete floor. Tracks of disturbed dust where water had gotten in snaked across the ground.
“After you,” Dave’s brother said.
Casey stepped onto the creaking staircase and realized with a start that he didn’t even know this man’s name. It was far too late to ask now. He had committed to a course of action that would put him in a weird basement with a cop whose name he didn’t even know. What else had he forgotten was down there in the course of everyday life? What if someone had painted the actual words to KCSW somewhere and they’d forgotten about it? Why the fuck did Dave invite this guy to begin with? Why not just get a beer or something on the East Side? Or Brady? They loved cops on Brady!
The creaks behind told him that the man was following him down.
When they turned at the bottom of the stairs, the space was revealed in its musty glory. The flag was hanging there, as predicted. Graffiti did punctuate the walls, though much of it was of the nonsensical variety, and no exhortation to kill cops or smoke weed was explicated there.
“So this is basically it, I–” Casey turned when he heard the click. About a foot in front of his face, he saw a tiny hole that felt as though it would swallow the universe. Casey wasn’t certain he had ever actually seen a gun this close before, but now he was seeing it. It was seeing him, too.
“Go stand against the wall by the water heater, and don’t move.”
“Hey man, this isn’t funny,” Casey said.
“I ain’t laughing. Go stand by the water heater.” Casey backed up and soon felt his probing hand meet up against rough wall.
“Turn around, face the wall.”
“Dave’s gonna be here soon, man, this is fucked.”
“If you do what I say, you’ll be fine. I don't want to add your blood to this place anyway.”
Casey turned to stare at the wall and watched a little spider dance along the brick.
The man’s footsteps were soft on the cement floor, but Casey could track him as he moved to the band area. He heard the soft flutter of the tarp being lifted and the plastic on plastic scrape as it folded onto itself.
“Ah yes, here we go,” the man muttered.
Casey wanted to turn, wanted to see whatever it was the man was seeing, but he weighed that choice against the likelihood of being killed in his own basement.
“We thank you, We thank you. We gather here. We thank you. We thank you,” the man muttered. Something popped open, like a jar full of yeast. Something alive, something waiting to burst out. “We gift you choice seed, we gift you our lifeblood. We thank you. We thank you.”
What the fuck? Casey thought, but just as the curiosity began to overwhelm him, he heard footsteps as the man ran across the floor. Casey flinched, but all that came was the sound of the downstairs door banging open. A cool breeze wafted in, clearing the musty smell of the old basement.
Footsteps upstairs drew his attention, and soon Dave’s voice rang out, “Yo! Casey! Where the fuck are you, dude?”
The spell broke, and Casey wandered up the stairs, sparing only a brief glance at the disturbed tarp, at the liquid that seeped into the floor there, growing lighter even in the half-second he looked. He barreled up the steps.
“Where’s the guy?” Dave asked.
“Your brother? Dude he pulled a gun on me and like, jizzed downstairs or something.”
“My brother’s a half hour out. I called him to rag on him for being so early. Wait, jizzed?”
“Well, I don’t know. He did pull a gun, and then he prayed and there was this stuff. Come on.”
Casey led Dave into the basement, and while the tarp remained out of place, there was nothing on the floor. The two of them put the tarp back and closed the basement door. Casey took an extra moment to lock it.
Before Dave could say anything, try to get more information, Casey retreated into the shared bedroom and hunkered on his bed, separated from Dave’s with a rack of clothing. He drifted into a fitful nap.