Valerie Should Despair...

Just watched another execrable episode of Masters of Horror, the series that most definitely does not live up to its name. This episode, "Valerie on the Stairs," is misdirected by Mick Garris, based on an original story by Clive Barker (which, I have to presume, he threw away here because he realized that it was too bad to actually put into print).

This abysmal tale focuses on a writer who moves into a rent-free sort of writer's commune known as the Heiberger House. Supposedly, this is a halfway house for unpublished writers who are on their way to being published.

Last time I looked, Clive Barker had managed to write a story or two... so why in the world did he construct this garbage story that presents the ideas that writers are all psychotics who have to work away from society, isolated from all but their art. This was a literary cliché long before Tennyson's "Lady of Shallot," but at least Tennyson gave the concept a bittersweet melancholy. Barker transforms the isolated environment into a charnel-house (I presume as a metaphor for his butchery of the concepts of storytelling), totally abandoning his own premise in the process). This is supposed to be a home for unpublished writers, but it turns out that several of the people who live here have been published after all...

What still baffles me, though, is why a perfectly talented man like Barker wants to perpetuate the myth that writers are socially inept, emotionally stunted, intellectually warped, psychologically disturbed people who cannot create while interacting with society. It's an inaccurate, stereotyped, outdated gimmick that makes the story seem even dopier than it might have been otherwise. (I also want to know why Barker assumes that a laptop computer will lose what has been typed into it when there's a power failure... that's precisely why I use a laptop, because it has a built-in power supply that works through intermittent power failures!)

As for Mick Garris... well, this is a man who couldn't make a true horror film even if someone gave him an unlimited budget. He has no idea how to frighten, only how to startle; he mistakes gore for fear, dealing out far too much of the former and none of the latter.

Remember when the relaunched Outer Limits came on, and those of us who remembered the original wondered why the new series just couldn't get it right? Well, Masters of Horror makes the relaunched Outer Limits seem like the product of literary and cinematic geniuses; episode after episode, it seems to be a contest to see who can be more embarrassed by the wretched quality of the series, the directors or the writers. I think it's a tie... they're both losing...