13 Days to Halloween (12) - Lansdale + Coscarelli's "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road"

BLOT: (19 Oct 2010 - 01:42:44 PM)

13 Days to Halloween (12) - Lansdale + Coscarelli's "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road"

If I was ever forced to pick five horror writers and had to stick with just those five for the rest of my life, Joe R. Lansdale would be on that list. His horror output might be outweighed by his Weird Texas Butt Kicking genre, but even his least true-blue horror tale have a sense of menace and out-of-place'dness. Combining elements of sometimes horror scribes and sometimes cynics like Ambrose Bierce and Robert E. Howard with an unflinching love of Texas and blue collar, red neck poetry, Lansdale delights in a no-holds-barred form of writing. Pushing the reader up against an uncomfortable wall and then pouring more on. He does not, at least not always, subscribe to the sexual deviance of Edward Lee or the unflinching word gore of Jack Ketchum, but instead lays out the strange, violent inner soul of humanity living in an inhuman universe. People die, get molested, skinned alive, and are tortured by inner demons. We are just along for the ride.

"Incident On and Off a Mountain Road", a name reminiscent of Bierce's "An Incident on Owl Creek Bridge", was originally pubished in 1991 in Night Visions 8, a hardcover collection of original horror stories and was collected in High Cotton (which I recommend to just about anyone interested in Landsdale's short, horror fiction) recently. It is about a woman driving on a mountain road in the middle of the night who hits a car left stranded. When she gets out of investigate the crash, she finds the car's owner being assaulted by a large, monstrous man.

In the premier episode of the entirely too short-lived Masters of Horror, Don Coscarelli keeps by-and-large to the original short. Bree Tanner starts out all twee. Fragile. So ignorant of obvious clues that in flashbacks she laughs at a man talking about killing and self-empowerment on a first date (later to be her crazy, abusive husband). These flashbacks, laying out her tragic story, are also her empowerment as she uses past lessons and travails to overcome current ones. She embraces his philosophy of do the unexpected. She experiments and plays at traps and tortures, though many fail to prevent the onslaught. The episode pushes her closer and closer to the edge of do-or-for-real-die, and no more playing around. That's pretty much the issue at stake: can she be monster enough to survive the monster in front of her?

"Incident" is roughly in the same category as I Spit on Your Grave, but better balances the abuse against the woman with the abuse the woman dishes out. Where Spit failed—making the revenge killings feel like cheap gore shots as opposed to an honest exploration of how monsters are made and how not every victim is undeserving—"Incident" manages to hold the theme steady by introducing all the various monsters upfront. It then later contrasts the behind-the-scenes nature of life's real evils against the over-the-top backdrop of Moonface and his country domain.

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween Night, 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010