MORE FLIES ON GRAY VELVET: I should just give up and blogroll the Horror Roundtable, you know? This week’s entry, on favorite horror locales, gets several terrific responses. (Someone else likes The Bat Whispers!!) I’m adding those Venice movies to my Netflix queue, pronto.

I also keep thinking about my if-only horror anthology. I’m going to talk more about it, which I hope will spark more comment or something rather than diminishing the concept. These are some thoughts on why I hooked each director to their especial trope.

Alain Cavalier, werewolf or serial killer: Therese is probably the best movie I’ve seen about a saint; and therefore it’s a movie about the longing for Heaven, for theosis, for divinization. Werewolf is the opposite trope, man descended into animality rather than raised up into the Divine. I would love to see a werewolf movie with theology. Why is a wolf less terrifying than a werewolf? I think Cavalier could show us.

As for serial killer, Therese used tight close-ups and beautiful, high-contrast darkness/white light shots to convey an enclosed world with few, but intense, relationships. I’d love to see how Cavalier would convey a serial killer’s world with many but shallow relationships, nothing below the surface except horror; or a world in which every other person is viewed, by the killer, as just another empty mirror.

Marc Cherry & Alfonso Cuaron, evil carnival: I, uh, loved Desperate Housewives s1 (and liked the next two seasons quite a bit), and also Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and also evil carnivals in all media, from Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel better than movie, though I like both) to “–And The Horses Hiss at Midnight” to Carnival of Souls to Siouxsie’s Carousel. Also, I wanted some comedians.

Julie Dash, zombies or anything vodoun: I’ve said before that I prefer vodoun-style zombies to the Romero-and-after kind. There aren’t too many of the kind of zombie movie I like, and all the ones I’ve seen have a colonialist overtone, even when they also incorporate implicit critiques of colonialism, as White Zombie does. Dash could do zombies without racism, or vodoun used in the way that Catholicism is used in The Exorcist. I’d love to see that.

Hirokazu Koreeda, ghost ship: I’ve seen two movies by this guy, Maborosi and Nobody Knows. Ghost-ship movies get much of their resonance, for me, from those images of the brooding, anti-meaning ocean, an unintelligible sublime that’s the opposite of God. Maborosi proves that Koreeda (? not sure which is his surname, actually) could do that. Ghost-ship movies also require the contrast between the ocean outside and the tight, enclosed, human-infested spaces of the ship–“terra firma in inner man“–and Nobody Knows proves that HK could do that part too.

Richard O’Brien, sometimes they come back: Heh, this was more random: I wanted O’Brien, because he’s awesome and hilarious, and I wanted “sometimes they come back” because I’m obsessed with it yet find few examples of it done the way I want.

Pet Sematary (novel, not movie) was amazing, King’s best work; but most “came back wrong” stories rely on an over-easy assertion that it’s wrong to cheat death without any sense of why that might be true. My most blatant example of this is the Buffy episode right after “The Body”–I can’t remember the title, but if you’ve seen it you know the one I mean–where there’s an explicit conversation about why bringing back the dead might be wrong, but you never get anything beyond, “Uh, it might not work.”

Pet Sematary, I think, actually shows the protagonist’s confusion of love with self-comfort and self-projection from fairly early on in the story–what he wants back is only partly the dead beloved. Mostly he wants to stop hurting–which is incredibly sympathetic… but not quite the same thing. And so it makes sense to me that he gets back nothing but a familiar skin filled with projected horror. It resonates with CS Lewis’s observation, in A Grief Observed, that death replaced the real and surprising beloved with cliched, sentimental, self-projecting and predictable memories and fantasies of her: It’s just false to say she “lived on in his memory.”