Movie Reviews for Writers: Amuck!

So... What does it take to bring me back to the movie reviews for writers? Of course, another sleazy Giallo thriller. This time it's Silvio Amadio's is-it-a-Giallo-or-isn't-it mystery Amuck! 

Why do so many Giallos feature writers? It almost makes one wonder which has more stories about writers caught up in horrific events -- Stephen King or Giallo? (But that's a question for another day). 

In this fun romp through the murderous halls of a writer's island mansion (see, it's a fantasy, I tell ya), Barbara Bouchet plays Greta Franklin, a secretary/typist hired by a publisher to help novelist Richard Stuart finish his current novel. She's there, however, to investigate the disappearance of her friend Sally Reese, who was the previous secretary/typist. Throw in some sexy parties and no-attachments-needed relationships, along with a murder and a body hidden in a swamp, and it's a fairly typical setup for a thriller. Without the tropes of black gloves and the razor blade POV camera, it's not, however, a typical setup for a Giallo. 

All that aside, you're here for what it has to say about the life of a writer. 

Well, this movie is pure wish fulfillment. It's the kind of thing people who aren't writers like to imagine the life of a famous novelist is like. 

Publishers who foot the bill to give writers assistants aren't common, and to be honest I don't think I've ever heard of that. Maybe it was common in the early 1970s, but I tend to doubt that as well (it is a conceit of the romantic comedy Paris When It Sizzles also, so maybe there is some ancient truth to the idea). Still, it would be nice, huh?

Transcribing a novel into a dictaphone (or the modern equivalent, a speech-to-text file) is something I have tried. However, for me, it's a bit of a challenge. I think I'm one of those writers who thinks better with my fingers than with my mouth. I think that for me literally, the act of typing as the ideas form in my brain helps them form. I do so much going back and correcting in an audio file that I wonder if it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to make sense of my backtracking. 

Plus, I find that I edit a lot as I type. Any typist a publisher might send me would most likely quit because of the frustration I caused him/her/them.

The novelist in question is writing his first thriller. People's reaction to that is the most authentic part of this film. 

They're aghast. Why would you want to do that? You'll kill your career (sure, but pay no attention to covering up a murder). 

It's something I hear from friends who tend to write in a single genre and then want to try their hand at another. "Why would you do that?" fans ask. "As long as you don't stop writing ____________ (fill in the blank with the genre of choice), I guess a one-off is okay."

It makes me glad I never stuck to one genre. But then, publishers don't send assistants to writers like that. And I sure wouldn't mind an assistant like Barbara Bouchet. Just saying.

New submission opportunity -- Remixing Giallo

Attention, all you folks looking for the coolest anthology ever to submit your crazy, creepy, sexy, bloody little stories to. I'm putting together the story collection outlined below. You're officially invited to submit. 

Giallo Re/Mixed & Re/Imagined
(AKA Sending Argento Into Space)

If you're a fan of Argento, Fulci, Bava, or Martino, you are familiar with the Giallo film genre. But did you know it got its name from yellow mystery books? Of course, the movies took it way past mere mystery into something almost synonymous with “Eurosleaze.”

Black-gloved killers. Sexed-up victims. Blood so red and thick it could never be real. But at its heart, a Giallo thriller was always wrapped up around a twisted murder mystery story that kept viewers guessing until the final blood-drenched scene. 

That's the vibe I'm hoping to recapture here in this anthology. 

Twisted mysteries that have one foot in violence and another in crazyville and bring to mind classics such as Twitch of the Death Nerve, Deep Red, What Have You Done with Solange?, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, Stage Fright, Baba Yaga, Tenebre, All the Colors of the Dark, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Blood and Black Lace, and Four Flies on Gray Velvet. (If you haven't watched any of these, please do. They're awesome-tastic, whether you choose to write for this anthology or not. 

The twist on this, though, for this anthology is:

Each story must take the standard tropes of Giallo and put it in a different genre setting. No two stories can be in the same setting. Wrap your story proposal in the trappings of sci-fi, Western, urban fantasy, summer camp horror, Gothic romance, Dickensian, superheroes, sword and sorcery, planetary romance, 70s urban crime, haunted house ghost story, medical thriller, martial arts, bodice ripper, samurai epic, etc. 

Sound like fun? I thought so. 

The details:

• Stories must be between 5-7k words.
• Stories must use the tropes of Giallo (gloves, up-close killings like knives and garotes, no poisoner or sniper types).
• Stores must be in a setting other than traditional Giallo.
• Story pitches must be approved before you turn in the story. Someone else may have already claimed the Western you had an idea about.
• R is welcome. Hard R can be even better. But let's avoid NC-17 or X though. 
• All characters must be original. No public domain characters or characters from Giallo flicks that would need to be licensed.
• The best Giallo stories still drop clues like any good mystery, even with all those twists and turns in the plot. 
• When in doubt, remember that "over the top" is your best friend here. 
• All stories will be approved by the editor, me. Speed is good, but this isn't first-come, first-served. 
• If you have questions, please email me for clarification.

Let me see your ideas, and we'll put a super cool book together. 

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For those of you who were interested in the Giallo-inspired book (Giallo Re/Mixed & Re/Imagined), here's a sample of what I'm looking for when you send your pitches. You can also consider the Samurai epic setting no longer on the board. It's all mine. 

Petals Fallen Off and Scattered So Suddenly

A giallo-style story set in Edo-era Japan

by Sean Taylor

Hisakichi is a ronin who wanders Japan taking jobs as he finds them. Sute is a disgraced geisha already kicked out of her master's chambers and now wanted for the deaths of three of his heirs. If found by the Daimyō's guards, she will be beheaded with barely an afterthought of a trial.  

Having found Sute (whose name means "foundling") weeping over the latest victim), Hisakichi is determined to protect her and vows to buy back her honor by solving the crime and finding the true killer. 

The killer slices the neck of each victim with a kaiken, the weapon of choice for a woman for self-defense, and leaves a scattering of cherry blossoms beside each body (which signifies the idea of mikkaminumanosakura, or sudden change in life). There is also a single bloody koto (gauntlet) left on the other side of the body, the one worn for the murder, which only makes the killing so much more confusing -- a warrior's glove paired with a woman's blade and a ritual flower.

But he's no detective or wise man, so he knows the odds aren't in his favor, even as the killer picks up the pace almost as if to taunt him. Not only that, the woman he has vowed to protect is also hiding a devastating secret from him.

Movie Reviews for Writers: Ubaldo Terzani Horror Show

I've been rediscovering Giallo works that I managed to miss somehow, and this is one of those beautiful films that blurs the lines between horror and Giallo. 

Horror movie director Alessio is a talented visual storyteller but not as talented when it comes to writing the story he uses the camera to tell. So his producer hooks him up with master horror writer Ubaldo Terzani, the author of many bestselling scary novels. 

Immediately, Alessio picks up a full run of Ubaldo's work, and finds himself thoroughly engrossed in them. When he first meets the master, his first question is the obvious one:

Alessio: How do you write books with such realistic horror? I mean your stories are creepy. They have a concreteness that you do not find in the pages of any other writer of this genre.

Ubaldo: Maybe because the others are amateur. (Ubaldo laughs)

Alessio: Come on, seriously.

Ubaldo: Look. I know horror because I go deep into it to look. I make pacts with my ghosts. I speak to them daily. It's as if I am my right eye and they are my left eye.

Alessio: That's a vague explanation. 

Ubaldo: Then try to be more precise. What else do you want to know?

Alessio: I don't know. Perhaps there is something that inspires you. For example, perhaps your crude scenes were assisted by observing autopsies.

Ubaldo: Autopsies. No, they are the easy way out that I willingly leave to the mediocre writers like Clive Barker (Ubaldo laughs). There's no need for the help of observing autopsies to know horror. The horror is inside of you. It is deep down inside of you where you have to look to pull it out and then work with fantasy. To achieve excellence, we have to destroy the common belief that in order to write certain stories we have to give them directly. there is nothing more false.

It's clearly the more spiritual, more magical, more "art" side of writing rather than the practical, the day-in-day-out, the "craft" side of writing. I know and love authors from both sides of this. I have writer friends who define what they do as some kind of intrinsic, born-with-it art with a capital A. I have writer friends who believe that it's nothing more than a learned and practiced skill set that comes with diligent work. And I have lots of writer friends who believe in a combination of the two extremes. 

But the question of research is another one entirely, in this case, on display as "autopsies." There are simply things that you can't know as a writer without research. There are things that if you fake them in your writing, you will be called out by readers as a fraud. When it comes to science and history and geographic details (along with many other things), research matters, regardless of whether you practice ART or CRAFT. 

Then there's the discussion on whether we writers follow our own rules and advice or not, but we'll cover that in a moment. 

Back to the story, though, where our dear Ubaldo is practically the devil at the crossroads. He's clearly playing with Alessio. This is illustrated magnificently in a scene in which Alessio insists his character Martina would not be so easily seduced by an old man, after which Ubaldo describes the scene and sets it so vividly with details that even Alessio (suddenly finding himself in the Martina role) all but is seduced by the old master of words himself. It's a beautiful way of capturing how it's not the words and characters themselves but the delivery and portrayal of them by the writer that ultimately makes them real, no matter how imaginary they may be. 

 Ubaldo convinces Alessio to invite his girlfriend to the mansion, and during that time he hears the words we all long to as writers (upon learning that Sara has read all the books in her boyfriend's time with Ubaldo). "It was like a drug," she tells him. "I couldn't stop. I read them all."

The remainder of the film sets up a pretty cool contrast between a "live by the sword, die by the sword" moral and the truth that we writers often say one thing but live another. 

You see, we writers tend not to live by our own rules. It is one thing to tell our trade secrets in interviews, but it's another to actually live by all those things we purport to. 

"I always do this," we may say on a podcast, but the truth is often that we did it once or twice and found it worked well for us, but we quickly forgot about it until the interview question triggered the memory.

To say more at this point would be to spoil this bloody, artsy, beautifully deranged movie. Suffice it to say, it's one thing to be the writer you are in interviews, but another to be the writer you are in reality.