The HBO Homebrewer: Coming Attractions

In this age of streaming video and movies-on-demand, one of the things I miss is the planning and anticipation that went into the simple act of television viewing when I was a kid.

Now, what I am discussing here is not the near PhD-level of knowledge that was required to program the average VCR back in the day. That kind of planning was something altogether different. The anticipation of watching a movie you had recorded was replaced by the anxiety of whether or not you had actually successfully set up your machine to record it. Oh, the pain of discovering that you’d taped Channel 11 instead of Channel 4 and were now watching Bowling for Dollars instead of Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster! God knows, when watching City Slickers, I felt Phil’s frustration and inadequacy.

No, what I am talking about is the simple joy of tracking down a particular episode or movie, discovering it was playing on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time, and having to put yourself in the best position to catch it when it aired. To do this you had to be willing to do a little work.

There were quite a few ways to see the television schedule as a whole and from that make your viewing choices. Daily newspapers carried a list of that day’s programs. Outside of a particular show’s broadcast time and channel, however, there was rarely any information given from which one could make an informed decision. I mean, sure, at 9 o’clock Channel 44 is showing a something called The Fool Killer, but what kind of movie is that?

(Actually, The Fool Killer is a great slice of Southern Gothic Americana starring Anthony Perkins…but that’s not important right now.)

For those less adventurous tv viewers who needed a little more information, there was the weekly tv schedule insert that came with the Sunday edition of their local newspaper. It was, along with the comics and the sports sections, always a part of my own personal “Holy Three” of Sunday reading. Most Sunday tv supplements offered a brief explanation of the movie in question along with the name of an actor or two. If you were lucky, your city’s newspaper had a “critic” on staff who would write reviews of upcoming shows or features on various actors or other show biz types.

If you were a fancy-pants, then your family subscribed to that  ne plus ultra of home delivered television criticism: TV Guide. With the Guide, one got everything in one bundle: detailed daily tv schedules for the week (including morning, afternoon, Prime Time, and late night), in depth articles and interviews, and ads for movies-of-the-week and series that fairly popped off the page, grabbed you by the front of your shirt, and demanded you to watch.

My own family did just fine with the Sunday newspaper TV section, but my Nana Lewis subscribed to TV Guide. Let me tell you, I looked forward to our weekly Sunday visits to her Ambridge, PA, apartment not just because it was huge and allowed me space to run around or because she made the best roasted chicken I’ve ever had (she left the skin on, and it got so crispy and juicy and…yum!), but because I could spend time perusing the latest issue of the Guide. While the rest of the family sat around digesting their dinners and watching 60 Minutes (yawn!), I’d crawl behind my grandmother’s easy chair and go through the magazine page by page. Some of the ads were so scary, I was barely able to look at them let alone plan on watching whatever they were promoting.

All of the broadcast schedules could be neatly contained in the aforementioned media. In most television markets in the 1970s, there were only three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC (FOX didn’t come around until the late-1980s) — a public broadcasting station (home to Sesame Street, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and Mystery!), and maybe, if you were lucky, a smattering of independents (in Pittsburgh, we had WPGH-TV 53, which later became our FOX affiliate, and WPTT-TV 22). That was it. It wasn’t until cable television became more widely available that the channels that the average tv viewer had to parse jumped from half-a-dozen to nearly 80 by the end of the 1980s. Having access to a magazine like TV Guide became paramount to being able to keep track of everything that was available to watch.

In 1981, my family joined the ever-growing millions of American households that were jumping on the cable tv bandwagon. There was a FOMO aspect to it, but also, I’m sure, there was a social status to being able to afford the additional charges to watch what was essentially a free service. Sure, anyone could watch what was on network tv on a given night, but cable viewers, for around $15/month, had a score or more of other options available to them.

We didn’t stop at the basic cable package, however. For an additional monthly fee that was almost as much as the price of cable itself, we gained access to the channel that rewired my tv-obsessed brain: Home Box Office (HBO). Suddenly, I was able to watch movies the way god intended — uncut and uncensored. (Although, unbeknownst to me, due to the difference in the aspect ratios between a square tv set and a rectangular movie screen, I was still seeing them pan-and-scanned.) Not only did we gain access to a whole new world of tv viewing, we also received a new way of planning and anticipating that viewing: the monthly HBO viewer’s guide.

That little twenty-page booklet was a game-changer. Not only could I see what each movie was about, who was in it, and what it was rated, I could also see why it had earned the rating it had received. At the end of each movie’s description was a brief series of categories meant to give viewers the tools with which to judge what was appropriate to watch. For a burgeoning horror movie freak like me, however, these categories were just neon signs screaming “…EAT AT JOE’S…EAT AT JOE’S…EAT AT JOE’S…” Anything labeled “Adult situations, adult language, graphic violence, strong sexual content, and nudity” got a big mental checkmark placed next to it. (I couldn’t put a physical checkmark in guide for fear of alerting my parents to my viewing habits!)

So, what’s all this talk of TV Guide and HBO got to do with anything? Well, I’d like to invite you to take a little journey with me back to those days of riffling the pages of the HBO Guide and looking for interesting movies to watch and discuss. Back in the day, HBO cast its broadcasting net a little wider and took more of a chance on little-known flicks. It was through HBO that I learned what a “sleeper” was in movie terms, those movies that suddenly gain a lot of attention without being given much promotion. (Eddie and the Cruisers was probably the first movie I heard described as a “sleeper” that I can remember watching.) We can expect to see quite a few movies that have since fallen out of favor or never really received their due (or a video release). Maybe we can make a few of them belated “sleeper” hits!

I’d like to make this a monthly series of blog posts. (I’d really like to say “weekly,” but long-time readers of this blog will understand why I ain’t promising that!) The first month I’d like to look at is the November, 1981, guide. This would be the first month that my family subscribed to HBO, and it includes the very first movie I remember watching on the service — Don Knotts and Tim Conway in The Private Eyes. Here is a link to that month’s guide (thank you Internet Archive), so you can peruse it at your leisure.

I don’t plan on going at this series — which I am calling “The HBO Homebrewer” — in a linear way, and I don’t plan on sticking to the years that my family had HBO — which was mainly the early- to mid-1980s. We will jump around in time, like Billy Pilgrim (who knows, maybe we’ll end up watching Slaughterhouse-Five at some point, too!), going where the interesting films and programs are. Look for new posts the first weekend of each month.

Until then…I’ll save you space on the couch!

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 31

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Epilogue

Sunrise: 7:12 AM

Sunset: 6:00 PM

A collection of newspaper articles clipped from the Portland Press-Herald. They all are dated from November 1975 onwards. All concern the strange goings-on in the vicinity of a small town in Maine called Jerusalem’s Lot. Odd sounds have been heard in the night, livestock have been killed, people have gone missing.

The man and the boy from the Prologue arrive in Portland, Maine, in mid-September 1976. They both rest and swim in the pool. The man reads the newspaper, paying close attention to the weather reports. The fire index has been set to its second highest setting. On 6 October, he announces to the boy that it is time.

Ben and Mark — the man and the boy — drive through ‘salem’s Lot. The town is, for all intents and purposes, dead. There are new names on some of the businesses, but there are many more that are simply closed down. Homes have their windows drawn against the sun. Paint is peeling; grass is high.

Ben and Mark drive past the Marsten House on their way to Harmony Hill graveyard. There, they get out of the car and look around. Ben notes that authorities think that it was from just this point that the fire of 1951 started. He tells Mark that if the vampires’ hiding places are destroyed by fire, then they will hide badly the second time, and they could be found. Mark agrees. Ben flicks his burning cigarette into the tall, dry grass. It catches and the wind fans the growing flames…

First things first, Blog-o-weeners — Happy Halloween! Woo-hoo! It is the highest of the High Horror Howl-idays — heh-heh-heh! I hope you are spending the evening either going out trick-and/or-treating and then stuffing your bellies full of Necco Wafers and Charleston Chews afterwards while you watch the Horror-thon or you are handing out candy to all the trick-and/or-treaters before calling it a night to eat whatever is left over in your bowls of Necco Wafers and Charleston Chews before pulling the lever on your Laz-E-Boy and enjoying the Horror-thon. Either way…enjoy the Horror-thon! I hear Silver Shamrock is putting on one helluva a show tonight. Be sure to tune in and wear your masks!

Now…onto the business at hand…

We’ve not only reached the end of the month and the end of Blog-o-ween, but we’ve reached the end of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. Can you believe it, kiddies? Holy cats!

Our month-long trip through Stephen King’s 1975 vampire epic ends back where it started. We are with “the man and the boy” (who we now know are Ben Mears and Mark Petrie) as we were 430-odd pages ago. We also get a look at the horrors of the Lot from the outside viewpoint of some newspaper articles just like we did in the Prologue. Heck, we even get some more epigrams from George Seferis.

(Was there a 2-for-1 deal on quotes from the Greek Nobel Prize-winner? Jeepers!)

As I said at the start of Blog-o-ween, I do love when a book uses other forms of media, whether it is in the “meta” form of a screenplay or a play or, as we have here, newspaper clippings. We learned at the beginning that Ben has been keeping tabs on ‘salem’s Lot via the Portland Press-Herald. The clippings we are shown are from the eight months after the killing of Barlow. We know from descriptions earlier in the novel that the town of Jerusalem’s Lot is east of Cumberland and twenty miles north of Portland in the southwest corner of the state. The datelines of the articles Ben clipped suggest that the remaining vampires seem to be slowing spreading their influence throughout the region.

It isn’t only the stories of grinning faces staring in windows or mutilated sheep that Ben is reading. He is also interested in the weather reports. It hasn’t rained in the area since the beginning of September, so the fire index has been set to five. The wind has also picked up. As someone who lives in Southern California, a lack of rainfall mixed with dry foliage and wind makes for dangerous wildfire conditions.

I’ve previously pointed out the influence of Jack Finney’s science fiction-horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers on King. In that book, one of the unsettling aspects of the invasion is that the pod people do not take care of the little town of Mill Valley. They seem to be okey-doke with the shoddy, rundown look of the town’s streets and buildings. It’s no different in the Lot:

“They had changed Spencer’s Sundries to a LaVerdiere’s, but it had fared no better. The closed windows were dirty and bare. The Greyhound bus sign was gone. A for-sale sign had fallen askew in the window of the Excellent Café, and all the counter stools had been uprooted and ferried away to some more prosperous lunchroom. Up the street the sign over what had once been a Laundromat still read ‘Barlow and Straker—Fine Furnishings,’ but now the gilt letters were tarnished and they looked out on empty sidewalks. The show window was empty, the deep-pile carpet dirty. Ben thought of Mike Ryerson and wondered if he was still lying in the crate in the back room. The thought made his mouth dry. 

Ben slowed at the crossroads. Up the hill he could see the Norton house, the grass grown long and yellow in front and behind it, where Bill Norton’s brick barbecue had stood. Some of the windows were broken. 

Further up the street he pulled in to the curb and looked into the park. The War Memorial presided over a junglelike growth of bushes and grass. The wading pool had been choked by summer waterweeds. The green pain on the benches was flaked and peeling. The swing chains had rusted, and to ride in one would produce squealing noises unpleasant enough to spoil the fun. The slippery slide had fallen over and lay with its legs sticking stiffly out, like a dead antelope. And perched in one corner of sandbox, a floppy arm trailing on the grass, was some child’s forgotten Raggedy Andy doll. Its shoe button eyes seemed to reflect a black, vapid horror, as if it had seen all the secrets of darkness during its long stay in the sandbox. Perhaps it had.”

Such is the kingdom of the vampires. Not very sexy, is it? Maybe dancing the night away to Bauhaus doesn’t leave a lot of time for painting the park benches.

As Ben and Mark stand on the hillside outside of town, Ben mentions that they are at the spot where many people agree that the fire of 1951 started.

“The wind was blowing from the west. They think maybe a guy got careless with a cigarette. One little cigarette. It took off across the Marshes and no one could stop it.”

But we, dear Blog-o-weeners, know how that fire started, don’t we? Way back in Part 2, Chapter 10: The Lot (III), Section 1, we learn the following:

“They know that a fire burned up half of the town in that smoke-hazed September of 1951, but they don’t know the it was set, and they don’t know that the boy who set it graduated valedictorian of his class in 1953 and went on to make s hundred thousand dollars on Wall Street, and even if they had known, they would not have known the compulsion that drove him to it or the way it ate at his mind for the next twenty years of his life, until a brain embolism hustled him into his grave at the age of forty-six.”

The town has its secrets, and many of those secrets seem intent on remaining hidden. The town will, so to speak, take them to its grave…heh-heh-heh!

Standing on the hills, Ben opens a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. Back in the day, when I was a smoker, I was a Marlboro man. Most of the cigarettes for sale in the 1990s were filtered brands. I did on occasion, however, mix it up with unfiltered Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls.

Filters were introduced in the 1930s by Viceroy, which was produced by Brown & Williamson. The first really popular filtered brand of cigarettes came out in the 1950s. Kent, produced by Lorillard Tobacco Company, found success thanks to a series of Reader’s Digest articles entitled “Cancer by the Carton.” These articles scared America’s smokers straight…or at least scared them straight to their local tobacconist’s to pick up a carton of filtered ciggies. Unfortunately, America’s smokers were unaware that Kent’s filters contained blue asbestos, the most carcinogenic type of asbestos. 

Whoops!

As he puffs away on all that tasty nicotine goodness (and I hope for the sake of the conflagration he is about to set off, Ben chose unfiltered Pall Malls—they just taste better), Ben looks at the emblem on the package of Pall Malls. Below the crest that features two lions facing each other is a banner with the Latin phrase “in hoc signs vinces” written upon it. This means “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” A rather fitting motto to have at the moment, wouldn’t you say?

People like to poke fun at the endings of King’s books. It: Chapter 2 (2019) made this a running joke as multiple people pointed out to King surrogate Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) that the endings of his books suck. The ending to ‘Salem’s Lot, however, is perfect in its open-ended ambiguity. Ben and Mark standing on the hill watching the fire spread, knowing that the job ahead of them may be too much for them, but agreeing to do it anyways?

Of course, we know that they may not have succeeded. It is unclear when the events of the short story “One for the Road” take place. At one point, a character says that “Jerusalem’s Lot burned out three years back.” A couple of paragraphs later, another character says, “…two years ago in the span of one dark October month, the Lot went bad.” So either Booth and Tookey go out to help Gerard Lumley find his family in a blizzard in January of 1977 or 1979. Regardless, it would seem that Ben and Mark were not altogether successful in ridding the Lot of its vampire infestation.

I wonder what happened in the months or years that followed the fire…

And that’s it, Blog-o-weeners. That’s all she wrote…or…all that I wrote, at least.

It’s been a blast sitting down everyday and writing about my favorite Halloween reading material. What I hoped would happen happened—by reading the book at a slower pace and picking it a part page by page I learned some new things about how it works as a whole. I also learned some interesting trivia about the real-life events and people and products that King mentioned. I hope you learned a little, too.

Man, I feel like the cowboy in The Big Lebowski…

This month has given me a little more confidence in using this space for future month-long, book-length read-a-long/write-a-longs. Maybe we don’t have to wait twelve months for Blog-o-ween to come around to enjoy each other’s company and a good book again? It would be fun to read another horror classic together. Or, maybe, a classic mystery novel? (I adore the works of Patricia Wentworth.) Keep your eyes peeled for more details…

I am still making my way through tv shows like Wings and Tucker’s Witch. I plan on posting more reviews on a more regular basis in the coming months…

Also, keep your eyes peeled for some original fiction by yours truly. I’ve got some short stories that I think would make a good fit for LARPing Real Life. I am also very, very close to having a completed first draft of a giallo novel in the bank. (There’s always room for giallo!) Maybe a follow-a-long of putting it into shape would be fun to share? Who knows!

All I do know is that when I talk about publishing posts on a more regular schedule, you all should…

Oh…and one more thing before I forget…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 30

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 48-50

&

Chapter 15: Ben and Mark

Sunrise: 7:11 AM

Sunset: 6:01 PM

Ben and Mark lower themselves into the basement of Eva Miller’s boarding house. After covering Jimmy’s body, Ben and Mark begin turning the place over looking for Barlow’s hiding place. Mark notes a Welsh dresser against the wall. They push it over to reveal a small, half-door with a padlock on it. Dousing a hand ax with holy water, Ben smashes the lock. His arms glow with an eldritch light that gives him the strength to batter the door down.

Inside the root cellar, Barlow’s coffin stands upright against the wall. All around it lay his children—the people of ‘salem’s Lot. Ben and Mark lift the coffin out of the room and open it. Barlow’s eyes lock onto Mark’s, and the boy tries to stop Ben. Ben flings Mark off of him, and as the sun sets and Barlow laughs triumphantly, he plunges the stake into the vampire’s chest. Barlow’s reign in Jerusalem’s Lot is ended.

The next day, Ben returns to the Lot. He leaves Mark across the New Hampshire state line in in the hotel they checked into as father and son. At Eva’s Miller’s, Ben burns the book he had come to the Lot to write and smashes the snow globe he had taken from the Marsten House as a souvenir. He goes downstairs and rescues Jimmy’s body from the basement. He find’s Barlow’s teeth and picks them up. They move in his hand as if they are trying to bite him. He tosses them aside in disgust. Before leaving town, Ben buries Jimmy and Mark’s parents in the Petrie’s backyard.

I know, I know…I can hear your complaints already, Blog-o-weeners: “Why are you featuring the death of Barlow today, the day before Halloween? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep that scene for the ultimate day of the month?”

It’s a fair critique, but…when have you ever had a class end on a high note? Usually, the last day of class is anything but dramatic. Like the first day of class, it’s mostly housekeeping—the teacher takes the role, there’s a general discussion of the highs and lows of the semester (favorite books, movies, what have you), you’re reminded to turn in your final project on time, and then the teacher wishes you a happy summer or winter break.

Blog-o-ween 2024 will not end much differently. We do have one more section to get through — the Epilogue — but then…after that…it’s just housekeeping.

But why are we wasting valuable space on what we are doing tomorrow? We’ve got a Master Vampire to kill today!

We’ve seen the effects of religious symbols before. Father Callahan’s crucifix glows as he smites the front door of the Marsten House. In Maury Green’s Mortuary, Ben’s own homemade (and punk rock) cross glows and keeps the feral Mrs. Glick at bay. There is a power in these symbols, one that seems to take a hold of whoever is wielding them to wield them in turn. Here, in Eva Miller’s basement, Ben uses one of the ampoules of holy water on an ax:

“It began to glimmer with eldritch fairy-light. And when he set this hands on the wooden haft, the grip felt incredibly good, incredibly right. Power seemed to have welded his flesh into its present grip. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the shining blade, and some curious impulse made him touch it to his forehead. A hard sense of sureness clasped him, a feeling of inevitable rightness, of whiteness. For the first time in weeks he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows. 

Power, humming up his arms like volts. 

The blade glowed brighter.”

Do not confuse this “power” with any particular religion. This is a rightness and strength older than any established church:

“Mark stared at him, amazed. The cold blue fire had crept down the ax handle and spread up his arms until he seemed to be working in a column of fire. His head was twisted to one side, the muscles of his neck corded with strain, one eye open and glaring, the other squeezed shut. The back of his shirt and split between the straining wings of his shoulder blades, and the muscles writhed beneath the skin like ropes. He was a man taken over, possessed, and Mark saw without knowing (or having to know) that the possession was in the least Christian; the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power; it was whatever moved the greatest wheels in the universe.”

I’m for any universal, elemental power that would turn me into a Frank Frazetta painting!

When the coffin lid is lifted, we get a look at what feeding on an entire town has down for Barlow’s looks:

“He was a young man now, his black hair vibrant and lustrous, flowing over the satin pillow at the head of his narrow apartment. His skin glowed with life. His cheeks were ruddy as wine. His teeth curved out over his full lips, white with strong streaks of yellow, like ivory.”

We also learn that for every Power of Good, there is, of course, a dark, mirror image. Barlow’s strength, even when the sun is still up, is overpowering. Mark is turned into an instrument of death by Barlow’s mere gaze. Ben, too, has the strength given him by the holy water drained from him by Barlow’s taunts inside his head.

And yet, for all of Barlow’s preening and triumphant crowing, he is in the end a big baby. Matt was right when he pointed out that Barlow’s letter held a picture of his overweening pride and that that pride would be his downfall.

(See…this is why you should always have an English major in your crew — it’s our job to close read and see between the lines of any given text!)

When Ben plunges the stake into Barlow’s chest, the vampire reacts in much the same way as when Mark spit in his face — he is full of utter disbelief. How could this be happening to me, he seems to say. His cries of “You dare not, you dare not…” are music to the ears. And I love Ben’s last, taunting words to him:

“‘Here it comes, you bastard,’ Ben sobbed. ‘Here it is, leech. Here it is for you.’”

It wouldn’t be a vampire tale without a look at the final dissolution of the bloodsucker. We got part of it with the death of Susan, but she was a newly turned vamp. Barlow has been around for centuries, so when actual death finally catches up with him, it is something special:

“The skin yellow, coarse, blistered like old sheets of canvas. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The hair went white and fell like adrift of feathers. The body inside the dark suit shriveled and retreated. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing in an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails went black and peeled off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen shirt. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull. The pants, with nothing to fill them out, fell away to broomsticks clad in black silk. For a moment a hideously animated scarecrow writhed beneath him, and Ben lunged out of the coffin with a strangled cry of horror. But it was impossible to tear the gaze away from Barlow’s last metamorphosis; it hypnotized. The fleshless jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal chords to power it. The skeletal fingers danced and clicked on the dark air like marionettes.

Smells struck his nose and then vanished, each in a tight little puff: gas; putrescence, horrid and fleshy; a moldy library smell; acrid dust; then nothing. The twisting, protesting finger bones shredded and flaked away like pencils. The nasal cavity of the skull widened and met the oral cavity. The empty eye sockets widened in a fleshless expression of surprise and horror, met, and were no more. The skull caved in like an ancient Ming vase. The clothes settled flat and became as neutral as dirty laundry.”

Here’s hoping our own horde of undead, bloodsucking leeches disappear as beautifully and horribly next Tuesday.

Later, in Chapter 15, we are treated to one last glimpse of the state of ‘salem’s Lot. It seems that the monster movies got one thing wrong: when the Master Vamp dies, their undead minions remain undead. Section 3 is quick run down of the horrors that are still afoot in the Lot. Each tiny vignette is lovingly painted in the best E.C. tradition.

One last thing before we call it a day. As Ben drives through the Lot the next day, he is reminded of an album cover:

“The empty streets made him feel cold in his bones, and an image came to mind, an old rock’n’roll album with a picture of a transvestite on the front, profile shot against a black background, the strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint; title ‘They Only Come Out at Night.’”

The album he is thinking of is by The Edgar Winter Group. The record only came out in 1972, so I’m unsure how a three-year-old album can be “old.” This “old” record contains the great Edgar Winter song “Frankenstein,” which automatically makes it a Monster Kid jam.

That’s all for today, kiddies. As I said above, tomorrow we have one little piece of ‘Salem’s Lot to discuss — the Epilogue. It’s less than ten pages long, so you should be able to get through it rather quickly.

Can you believe that tomorrow is 31 October; it is Halloween? This month has just flown by…on bat’s wings (heh-heh-heh!). But don’t you go thinking that just because tomorrow is the last day of Blog-o-ween that you can let your guard down and relax. If you’ve learned anything over the previous 29 days it’s that it is best to…