Crease Magazine

A free-improvisation review of Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel Some books construct worlds. Others discover a small door behind the world, pry it open with a spoon, and invite the unwanted through. Beyond that door there is no Europe, no factory whistle, no landlord climbing the stairs, no respectable uncle explaining how reality works. There are no inherited chairs arranged around an inherited table. There is no portrait of the emperor watching the soup cool. There is an asteroid. There is a sky that has not yet learned obedience. There are beings who have never seen a human face and therefore do not know which parts of themselves they are expected to hate. The place hangs in darkness like a jewel dropped beneath the furniture of the universe. It does not orbit so much as dream around something. Its mountains are thoughts that hardened before reaching a conclusion. Its caves retain the warmth of unfinished arguments. Its atmosphere is thin, peculiar, perhaps breathable only...

A free-improvisation review of Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor There are books that describe a room, and there are books that make the room begin breathing through somebody else’s lungs. This one enters wearing a paper crown, borrowed trousers, a dead man’s boutonnière, and the grave expression of a bankrupt prince arriving late to his own execution. It smells of greasepaint, spilled beer, hair tonic, damp wool, cheap perfume, old smoke, and the electrical scorch left behind when an angel plugs its trumpet into the wrong socket. It does not ask whether it is welcome. It kicks one shoe into the orchestra pit and begins. A face appears. Not a character exactly, because a character would have papers, habits, a childhood, a respectable internal structure. This face is more like a poster pasted over another poster pasted over a crack in a wall. The mouth talks. The eyes declare bankruptcy. The moustache has political ambitions. Behind the face, a hundred other faces are c...

How to Invent a Genre After Everybody Has Gone Home By Dax Silver Genres are usually named while they are happening, or shortly afterward, while the bodies are still warm and the record companies are still arguing over who discovered whom. Punk. New wave. Grunge. Acid house. Labels arrive like municipal workers, painting lines around something already moving. But sometimes the name comes decades later. Sometimes the music has to die first. Sometimes the malls must close, the posters curl at the corners, the VHS tracking lines become beautiful, and the young faces on the album covers must age into ordinary human beings before we can finally hear what was hiding inside the records. Teenage Chrome Noir is one of those posthumous genres. Nobody walked into a studio in 1985 and announced that they were making Teenage Chrome Noir. They were trying to make hits. They wanted radio rotation, MTV exposure, soundtrack placement, magazine covers, screaming teenagers, international lic...

And Why I Love Them Wes Craven: Literary Savage John Carpenter: Unforgiving Craftsman George A. Romero: One-Person Studio Tobe Hooper: Underdog, Scrappy, Ragged Genius Mount Rushmore is usually about authority. Presidents carved into stone, their faces made enormous enough to become geography. My horror Mount Rushmore would be different. These four faces would not look down from some clean, patriotic mountain. They would emerge from a scarred quarry behind an abandoned drive-in. Weeds through the asphalt. A radio tower blinking red in the distance. Somebody’s van parked nearby with a generator running. Wes Craven, John Carpenter, George Romero, and Tobe Hooper did not merely direct horror movies. They discovered four different ways that horror could think, move, survive, and tell the truth. They are not interchangeable. That is precisely why they belong together. Wes Craven: Literary Savage Wes Craven understood that horror could be intelligent without becoming respectable....

Hollywood Boulevard, Boogievision and Living in Oblivion Three movies about making movies after money, sanity and ordinary workplace standards have left the set By Don Overcast There is a particular moment in the life of every motion picture when it stops being an idea and becomes a workplace accident. Before that moment, the movie exists in the clean, oxygenated country of intention. Somebody has written a script. Somebody has imagined a performance. Somebody has convinced somebody else that money can be turned into light, movement and human faces thirty feet tall. There are meetings. There are promises. There may even be a folder. Then the camera arrives. The cable will not reach. The actor cannot cry. The generator is making a noise that sounds expensive. The location owner has changed his mind. A man nobody recognizes is standing behind the craft-services table eating all the grapes. The sun is disappearing. The film stock is running out. The producer wants nudity. The ...

Six Strange Movies to Quell the Unsure Spirit Messiah of Evil, Curtains, Rawhead Rex, Fade to Black, Galaxy of Terror, and Freeway By Buzz Drainpipe There are evenings when entertainment is insufficient. You do not want to be distracted. You do not want to be cheered up. You do not want a tasteful drama about recognizable people experiencing manageable difficulties before arriving at a cautiously optimistic conclusion. You do not want to hear that everything happens for a reason, because sometimes the reason is that the world is a poorly supervised chemical spill. On those evenings, you need medicine. Not medicine in the pharmaceutical sense, although take whatever the doctor gave you and do not accept medical advice from a film critic named Buzz Drainpipe. I mean medicine in the older, stranger sense. An object or ritual capable of changing your relationship to the sickness. Something that does not necessarily remove the wound but teaches you its shape. A mask, a drum, a s...