#CollecTori

[circifox]

The Collector

I cannot believe that I forgot to post this. I did have it in my queue, but I think I kind of just spaced about it. I believe I drew this before "For the Future" came out but after "Thanks to Them" around December-January ish. I love The Owl House and I'm disappointed that the show was cut short the way it was. Also?? The Collector? Dana how dare you give me this child in season 2. I love him. I generally adore bratty, colorful characters (see Joshua, Strawberry Crepe Cookie, Naoi from Angel Beats!, etc). Bonus if they're a threat. I had to wait for Disney+ to release the remaining episodes of Season 2, so I was introduced to the Collector in reverse order. They were a lot of fun to draw, though it was hard figuring out how to draw their imprisoned/shadow form with the references I had and the pose I was drawing. The Owl House- Dana Terrace and Disney

Posted using PostyBirb

[therealaugustus]

Novus stilus collectoris! Gratia pollentia Caesar!

[wordsonly]

Televisual Gold

To fold the sea and wrap the rankers

in gold ribbons.

Sub-marinal drones or charges 

Cutting into the blue 

Slice symbolic union

Over wheat gold bars.

Hammer and Silicone 

Xenophobic machinations

Inflating global masculinity   

Collectorially 

Trump carding through 

Ordinance and stats 

Congratulatory platitudes and mumbles 

Echo around chamber walls.

datarised and packeted

Jeopardy and dopamine excretion

Zero one Zero one for your viewing pleasure  

Death

In the palm of our hands

Is TV gold

Splice the inane

Splice the unconstrained

Gold ribbons torn 

Gold ribbons striated through processing boards 

Messages, chipped and tripped through

Wire and smoke 

Missile puppets 

With the glass cold systems of guidance  

Pressed upon the cheeks of sleeping men

Aroused in their barrels 

Shooting for the stars 

And Bars

Red

Zed 

Cutting into the blue 

Over gold.

Sub-terrestrial Ideology 

Machismo executing special distortions

04/10/22 

[miscellaneous-sun]

tags

#elder scrolls

#arena

#arena fighter (nord-breton warrior)

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#daggerfall

#vurhtem (redguard mage)

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#morrowind

#lielurwin gra-makdul (werewolf bosmer-orsimer barfighter + nerevarine)

#naramsinabi (ashlander dunmer buoyant armiger)

#ji'jirr (tojay khajiit rogue + nerevarine)

#telvanni darude (house dunmer spellsword + failed incarnate)

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#oblivion

#valynas othrando (dunmer agent + listener + hero of kvatch)

#agniild tax-evader (nord bard + sheogorath)

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#skyrim

#pokes-enemies-eyes (argonian warrior-mage + dovahkiin)

#ciciir dralanian (imperial warrior + dovahkiin)

---

#eso

#zanaranab assar-dansa (ashlander dunmer sharpshooter)

#blinded-by-nirnroot (tsona-thota argonian sorcerer)

#selvrayne galerothi (house dunmer acolyte + vestige)

#strums-strings-softly (tsona-thota argonian sorcerer + vampire)

#nilsse (bosmer crafter)

#keshaba (suthay khajiit warden + pirate)

#k'izshal-dra (suthay-raht khajiit monk)

#mazog gra-mazog (telvanni orsimer mage)

#fights-with-abandon (lukiul argonian veteran + hero)

#shunjirra-do (cathay-raht khajiit dragonknight + pirate)

#moronkh gro-nogash (orsimer-redguard bloodwitch)

#ataadhi sun-chaser (cathay khajiit templar)

#thenadda-ri (pahmar khajiit empress)

#nenwenye (altmer bloodwarden)

#dahlathra-jo (cathay khajiit alchemist)

#ja'ranaarr (alfiq khajiit necromancer)

#shadowdancer (ohmes khajiit assassin)

#ushamonk gro-atulg (orsimer warrior)

#sees-fish-swim (sul-xan argonian hunter)

#fallout

#new vegas

#jenny (courier six)

#warhammer

#brutus jenkins (human guardsman)

#claudia jenkins (human guardsman captain)

#oedipus (chaos space marine, warband split augers)

#anaxandrides (chaos space marine, warband mirrorhost

#na'mnen (daemonette, slaanesh)

#k'bikron (daemon, slaanesh?)

#erestix galatas (chaos space marine, legion iron warriors)

#raest (serf to galatas, like 10 years old)

#sorruk voss (space marine, chapter star falcons)

#dao ineh (human psyker, star falcons attaché)

#tk'sen (space marine dreadnought, former techmarine, chapter salamanders)

#kazovdi (princeps, warlord titan magna ignis)

---

#tarantulas (ultramarines successor chapter)

#sazimai vivius (space marine, chapter master)

#cyrio (space marine, chapter champion)

#araknus (space marine, head chaplain)

#guilliman bato betilienus (space marine, chief apothecary)

#lyvar ashmaker (space marine, chief librarian)

#verdezi (space marine, intended successor to sazimai)

#arcadese (space marine, former chapter cobalt spears standard bearer, librarian)

---

#oath of moment (in-universe novel trilogy)

#mitha casda (human recordkeeper, ultramarines attaché)

#markus ulitis (space marine, captain, legion ultramarines)

#kaeso balventis (space marine, sergeant, legion ultramarines)

#damraeys ("eldar", girlboss)

#lani (human)

#dnd

#renegade riot (adventuring party and band)

#semig rhinnun (half-orc bard + drummer) (me!)

#mabsur naib (half-orc sorcerer + lutist)

#discovery (tiefling cleric of maelstrom + vocalist)

#luvitrois (transformed dragon/elf rogue + harpist)

#bearchucks (brown bear monk + lawyer)

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#quazt (setting)

#monster eaters (party of hired mercenaries)

#scent of a storm (tabaxi barbarian + general cunt) (me!)

#vahlok gazadson (dragonborn fighter + moral guardrail)

#vicente vogt (human wizard + divorcee)

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#free cities of ghiz (setting)

#skullblast (small party, dead)

#novoril (half-elf paladin of shillia + teenage goth) (me!)

#mnason (human bard + normal old man)

#ancient teams (small party)

#elsys (eladrin druid + cat-curiosity metaphor) (me!)

#solchren (giant constrictor snake + elsys's pet)

#soffiya petrosian (dwarf artificer + reclusive shut-in)

#mr. wiggles (battle smith construct + soffiya's pet)

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#ruin of wyrm (party of housemates)

#bharryl daeldeg (dwarf artificer + divorcee) (me!)

#goidyn (collectori necroficer + general terror)

#rat the tall (goblin hexblade + damage dealer)

#sam twittchy (half-elf Horny Bard + comic relief)

#rook (kenku monk + party sweetie)

#rose blackthorne (tabaxi cleric + actual mom)

#sybil blackthorne (halfling druid + trapped ghost)

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#radiant collection

#thash mak'gwiir (drow-orc bard + noble) (me!)

#rix everan (owlin monk + fluffy baby)

#balfour (tiefling wizard + ex-warlock)

#pancake (awakened cat ? + nightmare fuel)

#c'laba (bugperson ? + meathead)

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#diplo-mace-y

#tylmae dawngleam (half-elf cleric of tymora + gambler) (me!)

#voslaarum (dragonborn fighter + the muscle)

#keid bronzebreaker (kobold artificer + chaosmonger)

#frederick bottomman (human fighter + sandwich connoisseur)

#pathfinder

#ghardaraky

#It's Not Graverobbing! (party of graverobbers)

#chett blavrepen (gnome magus + shameless flirt) (me!)

#ambrose cullen (dhampir ? + resident hottie)

#ferrowsdaughter rhianna shadowforge (dwarf cleric + straight man)

#bg3

#beirai (elf sorcerer + dark urge)

#vys (githyanki vengeance paladin + dark urge)

#tav (human barbarian + dark urge)

#clahtos nabith (dragonborn fighter)

#eldkahm opalforged (dwarf cleric of lathander)

#brikas (gnome ranger)

#divinity (tiefling ancients paladin of ilmater)

#thash mak'gwiir (drow-orc bard)

#vtm

#the night shift (waffle house employees of Phoenix, Arizona)

#elijah taylor (thinblood vampire + line cook) (me!)

#rodrigo alejandro vallarta rodriguez (thinblood vampire + host)

#terri benson (thinblood vampire + server)

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#as above so below (mercs of Los Angeles, California)

#john walker (gangrel + trucker) (me!)

#maría magdalena torres (lasombra + teenage girl)

#final fantasy

#kuzhuk mankhad (au-ra paladin)

#orij

#ange ampersand (goat anthro)

other tags

#canon's (characters who appear in canon, including dnd NPCs)

#others' (characters who are not mine and not NPCs)

#general (posts which do not currently fit into a tag)

[wolfy58]

1827 May Thursday 17

6 50/60

12

at my desk at 7 3/4 – studying Ebel’s route (no 4) from Bâle to Chaux-de-fond till 10 10/60 – then 1/2 hour reading the paper – from 10 40/60 to 11 10/60 breakfast – then finished dressing and went out at 11 3/4 – direct to Quai Malaquais No (numero) 1 according to advertisement in Monday or Tuesday’s paper Monsieur Tremery to begin a course of lectures on natural physics (natural philosophy) at 12 – the same course to be delivered in the evening at 7 on Thursday, Saturday and Tuesday – 20 minutes in getting there – the whole course would cost 100 francs – said I was going out of town for 3 or 4 weeks – well! could arrange that – might take one month (could not pay for lectures singulary) which would be 20 francs – agreed – walked into the lecture room – 2 ladies and 7 or 8 gents. (gentlemen) – waited 10 minutes – Monsieur Tremery commenced at 12 1/4 and the lecture was over at 1 50/60 – Physics (natural philosophy) and chemistry the 2 principal branches of science, and très liés – the properties of matter – étendue, indivisibilité, impénétrabilité, porosité – 3 espèces d’etendue, longueurs, largeur, profondeur – the 2 former, constitute superficies, the 3 collectory solidity – then we came to form – a regular form shewed the metre – explaind this measure and its divisions – the ten-millionth part of the distance between the north pole and the equator – a measure founding in nature –

F. 54 at 7 a.m.

56 at 7 3/4 –

65 at 11 40/60

61 1/2 at 10 35/60 –

very fine morning a few drops rain between 2 and 3, and a smartish light shower between 7 and 8 p.m. afterwards fine evening –

has toutes les faces égales, et tous les angles solides égales – only 5 regular forms in nature – (I presume he should have had six the tetrahedron) (a pyramid, pentahedron, hexahedron (or cube) octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron) having 4 faces, 5,6, 8, 12, 20 – various experiments to prove the impenetrability of matter – a long bell-tube (cloche) hermetically sealed at the top immersed in water to shew that the air in the tube prevented the water from rising far into it – the deeper the tube was plunged the higher the water would rise, but could never get quite to the top, because the air, tho’ compressible, would not penetrable – then a little diving bell plunged into the water to shew that its utility depended upon the same principle – if not perfectly airtight at the top, the water would force the air out in little bubbles – (it did do so, the little diving bell not being used lately and the copper at the top not fitting quite tight) – a real diving bell had 2 tubes one to let bad air out, another to let good in – air too much compressed bad for respiration, but not so bad as the opposite extreme – the air good when the mercury stood as it commonly did at 28 inch – next a bottle with 2 sponts and a funnel to one of them one open for the air to escape (when?) the water would enter – but if the one was stopt that the air could not escape, no water would enter – the sum of 2 equal volumes 1 of spirits of wine and 1 of water mixed was not quite so great as the sum of the 2 volumes separately # - mercury an apparent penetrabilety of matter – drew on a slate molecules (little o s, to represent the water, and little crosses to respresent the spirit of wine – the one fitted into the interslices of the other – this led to the porosity of matter – matter very      

#brass an alloy of copper and lapis calaminaris, had also a volume less than the sum of its volumes separately, but silver and gold? In alloy had a volume greater than sums of their volumes separately – if the proportions of the volumes of spirits of wine to water were not equal than the case was altered – you might so mix them as to make the sum of the volume of the mixture equal to the sums of the 2 volumes separately?

porous – great space between its molecules – hence there could be the effect of cold in contracting, and of heat in expanding and then to shew the effect of the pressure of the atmosphere in compressing or dilating, an half-filled with air bladder was put under the exhausted receiver of an airpump – atmospheric pressure withdrawn, of course the air in the bladder expanded and filled the bladder – La cosse d’œuf (egg-shell) very porous – a little portion of air in every egg – you would see it escape thro’ the shell – placed it in water (to make the passing of the air sensible by the small bubbles it would form) under the receiver – leather very porous – this and the pressure of the atmosphere shewn by fixing a bit of leather over the exhausted receiver, and pouring quicksilver up the leather which the atmosphereic pressure forced thro’ the leather in small globules into the receiver – the word pore defined insterslice between the particular molecules of matter – the pores might be full of any subtile fluid – e.g. air – in proof of much proded a small bit (perhaps 1/2 inch by 1/4 inch) of Hydrophane (species of agate) so called, because opaque while its pore full of air, but, on being suffered to tie some time in water, the water insinuated itself into the pores instead of the air, and the stone became transparant – the pores of the skin carry off all that is not useful to the body – Sanctorius (by a peculiar and ingenious balance of his own invention) weighed himself every hour or as often as requested, and found that, in 24 hours, he lost la cinq-huitième partie de la nourieture – shewed the brass head in which Lavoisier had his head well luted for 6 and 7 hours together to calculate the proportion of the transpiration pulmonaire to that of the transpiration cutanaée – 2 little glasses to look thro’ – a large tube opposite the mouth afterwards dividing into 2, one carrying his breath to a proper recipient, the other giving him fresh air – he found that supposing the whole transpiration || the pulmonaire = 4 the cutanée = 7. then we had Sanctorius’s balance explained, the nature of the lever being to be explained more fully at a future lecture. 1 oz. (ounce) balances 7 lb. (pounds) (16 oz. to the lb.) or 1 lb. balances 112 lb. – It is by this species of balance which one may see at the barrièrs here, that all heavy-laden carriages are weighed – here we ended at 1 50/60 – I waited to pay my 20 francs – and then sauntered along (looking en passent at maps and prints) to Perrelet rue du Bac No 40 – left him my watch to regulate, and brought a shabby silver one of his for the time (a week) – a drop or 2 of rain in passing the gardens – came in at 2 55/60 – wanting to turn to Hutton’s course of mathematics (mechanical powers) saw the disorder of my books and dusting and arranging them in one of my little bookcases took me till 4 40/60 – then till 5 10/60 wrote the first 22 lines (all but the 2 first lines) of today – Dinner at 5 10/60 – ready in 5 minutes and went out at 6 40/60 – walked above an hour (to the barrière) with Mrs. Barlow (detained 1/4 hour at a wine shop near the barrière by rain) and got back to her at 8 – then one hour and twenty minutes in bed right middle finger up she had a pretty good one - tea with Mrs. Barlow at 9 20/60 – she fancies Captain De Lisle of the 49th fleet (now at the Cape Good Hope, he on leave and just come here) a little stroll with Jane – got home at 10 5/60 Sat talking to my aunt then came to my room at 10 1/2 – reading Contes de Voltaire 20 minutes O .. -

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Novelist and lifelong collector Andrew’s eclectic colorful home is a former artist’s studio in England. A vintage Venetian mirror is above the fireplace, a flamingo is on the mantel and he has a statue of a boy from Bora Bora on the floor.

A striped ottoman sits on a vintage rug next to the sofa in burnt-orange velvet.

Colorful chairs pair with an original Arts & Crafts table. 

The underside of the gallery was stencilled with designs drawn from the ceiling of the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Italy.

Walls in ‘Invisible Green’ provide a background for artwork.

A Smeg fridge, floorboards painted in Farrow & Ball’s ���Rectory Red’ and an Indian rug pick up on the colors of the mural.

An antique Spanish mirror stands out on wallpaper above a velvet bed.

Andrew’s antique desk and all his collectibles highlight a vintage look wallpaper design in earthy colors.

https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/gallery/andrew-ohagan-novelist-house

[simonegeraci]

YIA ART FAIR | PARIS Stand 11 | Burning Giraffe Art Gallery

[collectori]

instagram.com/thunderdolls Marina Oliveira do Foxy Riders em bmw por Ton-Up Garage | Foto por Manuel Portugal / Fotografia

[moditrading123]

Polyurethane Dust Collector | Modi Trading

Modi Trading Polyurethane Dust Collectoris light weighted, durable and designed for maximum air flow. Modi trading is one of the leading manufacturer and supplier of superior quality of Polyurethane Dust Collector In India. For more information call us 9620000008.

[themightyzwei]

[ @fates-looking-glass​ sent from Barb for Nott ]

“I found them under your bed! And you know what? I licked every one of them.“

“You thieving little robot!” Nott shrieked and launched herself towards the Collectori. She didn’t really care that everyone seemed to consider the construct type thing a child. Especially sneaking the candy she had bought and saved to send to her own child. Her own child that no one knew about.

[fates-looking-glassarchive]

Barb - Skull Undercut

Barb is a Collectori that inhabited a doll made by three hags. She has a cats skull, with a little candle in it - her torso and arms are made of porcelain and her legs are goat legs. 

Due to her size, the bone parts are considered fetal ones.

[cheeseburgerfamily]

Cum Collection Copypasta

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A cum smoothie gulped smoothly

Consume the cum chalice

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David Hayter

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Father drowned Going down on the cum clown

Prolapse pounding

Toothpick sounding

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My nipple-pussy is aching

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My butt and cunny are in agony

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Cum-scented candle

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Cum treasurer

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A cum-slave

, back from the grave

The price for breaking a cum-oath

James Hector

 Cum collectorI

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Sans Undertale

, the cum reaper

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The Dark Souls of cum

Cum-framed, and cum-blamed

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Your nipples are crunchy

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Sweep up the cum flakes, Joan!

[phantasieandmirare]

How to Speedrun the DM’s Sidequest

We just finished our second session and we speedran one of the DM’s sidequests that she meant to last for at least a session or two, here’s how it happened

There are three people in the party, Rael the elf druid, Kothax the lizardfolk fighter, and Dolce the collectori bard (aka me), all level five. We checked out the bounty board and took out two basilisks with no problem, and when we went to collect our bounty we also decided to respond to another bounty which simply said ‘magic-savvy people needed’ at the dwarven high temple.

We get in there and meet the guy who needs magic people, Ogden, and he explains that his grandchildren have been cursed with lycanthropy and even though he removes the curse it keeps coming back. The kids haven’t messed with anything weird and Ogden can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt him or the kids. He and his close friend, Diana, have been working day and night on solving the problem but have hit a dead end. We’re taking copious notes, expecting an adventure to figure out how to break the curse, and decide we want to see and talk to the kids to get more information.

We get up to the kids’ room and Diana’s already there. Rael immediately insight checks her because she’s the only suspect/lead we had. The DM says we can make the check but also says ‘I mean she hasn’t said or done anything, she’s just there’, but in the middle of that sentence Rael rolls a natural 20 for a total of 24. DM sighs heavily and tells Rael that Diana is definitely suspicious. Rael decides to charm her and charm the two kids. Diana and one kid fail, one kid saves.

Rael however fails the sleight of hand check to hide what he’s doing, Ogden notices. I try to start interrogating Diana while Rael and Kothax deal with Ogden, but they roll an 8 on persuasion to get him to work with us and Ogden casts zone of truth on all of us. I’m the only one who saves on that. Ogden asks us why we’re there, I go to answer and he immediately shuts me up cause obviously he knows I saved. We start talking to Diana and she answers that she knows something about the curse and why it’s not breaking. I ask her why the curse isn’t breaking. Cue the persuasion check, and I roll an 18 with a +10 to persuasion because I am proficient in and applied Expertise to that skill for a total of 28.

The DC to get Diana to crack was a 25.

So Diana answers that she cursed the kids. Ogden, obviously pissed, casts dominate person and has her arrested, and removes the curse on the kids. He hustles us downstairs, gives us a medal to gain favor at any dwarf merchant in the city and a sack of 200 platinum, then tells us that he hopes he never sees us again. The DM explained afterwards that Diana made a demon pact to curse the kids to discredit Ogden so that someone else could take his place as head of his dwarf clan.

So basically what happened in character was the elf walked in, cast charm person for no apparent reason, and solved a curse that had been plaguing this family for seven months and unraveled a conspiracy that may have been brewing for even longer in about twenty minutes. My bard was the only one who had some semblance of an idea what was going on, while lizardman stood in the corner and had no idea what was happening at all for a solid twenty minutes. Needless to say we gave Rael 100 platinum and split the remaining 100 between me and Kothax. Kothax got 50 platinum to stand in the corner and look pretty while I got 50 platinum for being told to shut up and asking one question and beating a ‘very hard’ DC.

So we walked in and basically speedran the DM’s entire sidequest and it was glorious and I loved every second of it.

[dm-clockwork-dragon]

Welcome the Collectori!

A Fun little construct race made of lost bits and forgotton bobs, The collectori are my take on a Tiny player race! I see so many tiny races that are all just different variations of fairies, and I wanted to try and do something a little different. The Colectori are inspired by stitchpunk creations such as those found in the movie 9, as well as ball-jointed dolls and steampunk taxidermy creatures.

The Previews here low resolution, for the full PDF check out the full class using this handy dropbox link.

If you like what I do and want to support me, Check out my Patreon or Ko-Fi pages, or just come say hi on my Discord!

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/23 & 10/25/2018: HALLOWEEN (2007) & HALLOWEEN II (2009)

By the time Rob Zombie made the bold move of remaking John Carpenter’s name-making classic HALLOWEEN, the horror rock-star’s directorial career had already proved to be incredibly divisive. His 2003 film debut, HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES drew a cult from among diehard fans of his music, but was largely panned by critics who identified it as a ramshackle, self-indulgent disaster. The movie was little more than a Frankensteining-together of Zombie’s favorite things, but he managed to follow it up swiftly with 2005′s semi-sequel, THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. With this project, he appropriated three of the principle characters from his cartoony, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW-like first feature, and reimagined them as the redneck antiheroes of a story that plays like a cross between THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE WILD BUNCH. While DEVIL’S REJECTS showed major improvements in terms of drive and focus, it still felt unsettled. It is an emotionally confused movie that has trouble deciding whether its tale is more tragic for the innocent victims of its psychopathic protagonists, or more triumphant, for the Rejects’ anti-establishment swagger and charisma. Rob Zombie displays a refined aesthetic sense, and seems sincere in his storytelling, but he didn’t have much time to let these things ferment into a more potent cinematic brew before he stepped up to bat again with his controversial remake of the beloved HALLOWEEN in 2007. 

Reviled even by the likes of John Carpenter himself, Zombie’s dour, ponderous retelling of the archetypal slasher story was baffling to critics and genre buffs alike. Loaded up with clunky psychoanalysis that flies in the face of Carpenter’s original intention--Michael Myers is PURE NO-REASON EVIL, FULL STOP--this iteration of HALLOWEEN worked for few people besides Zombie’s hardcore stans. In spite of that very large and general problem, the writer-director was back again in 2009 with a sequel to his own remake. With HALLOWEEN II, he took two major creative risks: Bringing the ubiquitous Sheri Moon Zombie back even though her character died early in the first film, and centering the narrative on Laurie Strode’s psychological recovery, or lack thereof, from her original ordeal. It is easy to see how this setup would draw more complex and ambivalent responses. Mrs. Zombie’s appearance as the ghost of Myers’ mother, whose character is plagued by a lot of Jungian nonsense, was identified fairly as ludicrous by many viewers. On the other hand, Scout Taylor-Compton’s return as Laurie Strode takes a character who was little more than a cardboard cutout in the first film, and turns her into a convincing mass of trauma who undergoes a profound transformation over the course of this sequel. As with THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, HALLOWEEN II suggests that even while Rob Zombie can be an incredibly frustrating filmmaker, he still seems to be on to something. Even in my most stuck-up moments, when his smug use of slow motion and arias of unshocking cuss words make me want to forget everything I just watched, his movies nag at me in a way that I have a hard time describing.  I’m just now starting to formulate an understanding of why.

Often, I find myself asking: Who is Rob Zombie? First and foremost, he is a professional nerd. His music, art, videos, and feature films are strung together by his scholarship in all things genre, whether he’s invoking Tobe Hooper’s snuff-like realism, or the innocent sitcom pleasures of the Munsters. Zombie is vastly erudite about horror, and really anything remotely culty. This is actually to the detriment of HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, which is so bloated with pop culture references that it almost chokes out the movie’s dubious originality. But while he has that irritating nerdy compulsion to competitively show off what he knows, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who buys and bags comics without even cracking them open. Rob Zombie is clearly, legitimately passionate; it’s heartwarming, and enough to make you want to root for him even when you don’t totally love what he’s doing. His craftsmanship is on point, too, as a multimedia artist whose talent has been abundantly evident since the early band flyer days. It comes as no surprise that he attended Parsons School of Design, and he occasionally shows his hand as an amateur film historian with a love for golden age Hollywood. So, whatever he wants you to think about his hellbilly stage presence, he’s clearly no hick, and no basement-dwelling dweeb either. He’s an educated artist with a background in New York City’s brainy ‘80s noise rock scene. It’s because of this that I find the worshipful attitude his films take toward their sociopathic murderers to be, well...kind of annoying. Why am I supposed to think it’s so cool, as the movies’ punk rock tone suggests, that the Firefly family tortures random bystanders to death for no apparent reason? Why doesn’t Rob Zombie know how tired the whole “scary clown” thing is, and has been for a long time already, even when it’s someone as magical as Sid Haig under the greasepaint? Why do I feel like Zombie’s interest in pimps and ho’s is deeper than just exploitation pastiche, which makes it potentially worse than if it were just a shallow affectation? The thought of this Massachusetts-born college boy fantasizing obsessively about being so crude and violent and salt-of-the-earth is kind of lame. So, instead of just, you know, being a hater as usual, I looked it up--and discovered that Rob Zombie’s roots are actually in the fairway. As Wikipedia aggregates from various interviews: 

While raising their sons, Rob's parents worked in a carnival, but they chose to leave after a riot broke out and tents were set on fire. Zombie recalled the experience in an interview, stating, "Everybody's pulling out guns, and you could hear guns going off. I remember this one guy we knew, he was telling us where to go, and some guy just ran up to him and hit him in the face with a hammer – just busted his face wide open. My parents packed up real quick, and we took off."

Suddenly, it all started to make sense. Sure, the costumed popstar isn’t an undead cross between Jerry Lee Lewis and Charles Starkweather in real life, but he isn’t a complete poseur either. It isn’t immediately clear, from underneath his mountain of collectory movie references, that he is, more or less, writing what he knows. He isn’t just emulating his cultural heroes, he’s mythologizing his own childhood. 

In view of this, the key to Rob Zombie’s movies is not an awareness of horror history and semiology; it’s actually all about outlaw culture. So, back to 2007′s deeply flawed HALLOWEEN. It’s a heavily bro-y movie, in its outsidery way, that breaks up the Dr. Loomis-Michael Myers-Laurie Strode love triangle, and focuses almost entirely on building a Myers biography. The fascinatingly sullen Daeg Neergaard Faerch plays young Michael, a fatherless boy on the verge of snapping from the relentless torment coming at him from all directions: his slutty sister, school bullies who fixate on his stripper mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), and his mother’s latest violent, depraved boyfriend. Michael follows the serial killer script perfectly, graduating rapidly from torturing animals to brutalizing other kids to annihilating his sister, her boyfriend, and his mother’s beau one Halloween night when his sibling chooses sex over taking her little brother trick-or-treating. He soon finds himself installed in a mental institution where he moves on to slaughtering the staff. Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) spends years evaluating the boy, though he is ultimately stymied by Michael’s profound lack of humanity. As Michael increasingly retreats behind the folksy homemade masks he spends all day crafting, the opportunistic Loomis gives up on him, instead committing his energy to a money-making true crime/pop psychology book about Myers. Flashing forward, we find the hulking adult Michael Myers (played by the 6′8″ wrestler Tyler Mane) getting ready to bust out of the asylum and wage war on his home town of Haddonfield. There we finally meet teen dream Laurie Strode, a spunky babysitter with a gaggle of gal pals who are perfect grist for the slasher mill. In the final leg of the film, Myers carves his way through Laurie’s social circle, in an apparent attempt to reunite with his sister: Laurie herself. Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) reveals that when Michael’s despairing mother committed suicide years ago, he took her infant daughter and had her adopted out anonymously to insulate her from her family’s tragic history. Laurie, for her part, is unaware of anything other than her need to survive, which she only barely accomplishes.

Naturally, Laurie’s story is the weakest part of a movie that is otherwise so focused on male experience. That is, the experience of needing a father, the ambivalent and ambiguous craving for maternal intimacy, the trauma of having your masculinity impugned by your (fag-obsessed) peers, and perhaps even the undermining influence of academia and capitalism on a man’s natural-born strength and worth. When the newly-freed Michael Myers storms through a truck stop to begin his pilgrimage to Haddonfield, and Rob Zombie chooses to accompany this scene with Rush’s regal outlaw anthem “Tom Sawyer”, it tells you everything you need to know about this take on HALLOWEEN. Like the rampaging Firefly family in DEVIL’S REJECTS, Michael is certainly evil, but he also represents something essential about the formation of and reinforcement of one’s individuality in the face of castrating societal norms--something the carnies among whom Rob Zombie grew up would have found very relatable.

It’s worth noting here that, while the sexuality of the women in Michael’s life plays a role in his distorted development, he is not reacting to their sexuality in and of itself. Michael Myers is not driven by the kind of covetousness that we associate with the archetypal slasher, who gives sexually frustrated male viewers a vicarious thrill by punishing sluts and teases. Michael’s problem is that his mother and sister’s sexuality contributes to his isolation. His classmates use his mother’s profession against him, and that profession keeps her from being able to tuck him in at night. Similarly, Michael doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween with his family and the other neighborhood kids, because his sister is too busy getting laid. Michael is abandoned, even while he still has a home to return to, an outsider even in his own house. 

This leads me to an important point about why the portion of the movie that is devoted to Laurie's struggle is so ineffective. It is a flaw in the film, but a virtue of the director: Normal, attractive teenagers are not Rob Zombie’s people. He doesn’t even participate in traditional slasher movie misogyny, he’s so far away from thinking about them. His movies are full of badass women who are fully possessed of their sexuality, and who wield it like a weapon against hypocrites and assholes, and this is always shone in a heroic light. Moreover, he delights in casting women of all shapes and ages, often assigning them immense personal power, as in LORDS OF SALEM, an enormously satisfying movie about society’s original persecuted outcasts: witches. Rob Zombie is deeply committed to outsiders, and his definition of them isn’t limited to banal lawbreaking--he also rejects conventional beauty and our cultural obsession with youth. His films are populated by all manner of human beings, and the farther away they are from looking like model material, the more likely it is that they’re meant to be the heroes. On that note, whatever you think of his movies, you have to acknowledge that they are almost never dehumanizing. Zombie is an accomplished actor’s director who gets a full spectrum of emotion out of his performers, and who excels at creating a feeling of camaraderie within his ensemble casts. It is this surprising sweetness, and compassion even for the victims of the villains he lionizes, that makes HALLOWEEN II so peculiarly effective.

If 2007′s HALLOWEEN was a remake on which Rob Zombie couldn’t resist draping some of his personal hangups, HALLOWEEN II is almost a completely original and separate entity from what one thinks of as the franchise started by John Carpenter. In it, Michael Myers is presumed dead but his body is missing--and indeed, his character is missing for much of the movie. We find a disturbed, scarred-up Laurie Strode living with her surviving friend Annie, and Annie’s father, Sheriff Bracket. Laurie is dealing, poorly, with a heavy dose of PTSD. Along with nightmares and flashbacks, she also has trouble just being nice to people, or accepting affection. Annie and her father’s attempts to be charitable with their adoptive family member are no match for Laurie’s increasing surliness and mistrust of the world. Once a good-natured and optimistic young woman, her appearance becomes vagrant-like (curiously similar to Rob Zombie’s own casual look), her attitude is more and more nihilistic, and she develops a drinking problem. I’ve always wanted to see a movie with a slasher-like narrative foundation, but that focuses on aftermath and recovery, and recent gimmicky efforts like FINAL GIRL and LAST GIRL STANDING did absolutely nothing for me. HALLOWEEN II--at least, the superbly-acted Strode part of it--is the movie I’ve been asking for.

The other part of the movie is also interesting--or more specifically, it’s as ballsy as it is flawed. The movie gets off on kind of a bad foot when a title card quotes an obscure psychology text book called The Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams: 

WHITE HORSE - instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction.

This is the excuse we have for the fact that the ghost of Deborah Myers arrives with a white horse to compel her son to find his sister Laurie Strode, aka Angel Myers, to reunite their family, presumably in the afterlife. Deborah Myers is kind of a spectral cross between Glenda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, at once welcoming and sinister, drifting in and out of Michael’s consciousness in the company of a sort of ghost of his childhood (Chase White Vaneck, who is no Daeg Faerch honestly). It might be easy to dismiss this anomaly as an expression of Michael’s mental illness, and his desire to experience an idealized version of his youth in which his mother still looks after him--except that later in the movie, during the final standoff, Laurie is shown to be physically affected by these spirits. Maybe the implication is that she and Michael suffer the same psychological ailments, but for them to share such specific hallucinations without speaking is borderline supernatural in and of itself. So, while Sheri Moon Zombie does her best with her impressive force of personality and compelling physical presence, it’s hard to say what this part of the movie serves. When I first saw the film, I was completely outraged by this, not only because it made no sense to me, but because it felt like a cheap ripoff of Sarah Palmer’s similar prophetic visions of a white horse in Twin Peaks. That was all I managed to make of it. 

Today, I still don’t love it, but I have more trouble faulting Rob Zombie for trying to make HALLOWEEN his own, something more than a remake. He also does this by truly letting go of the Shape. The famous William Shatner mask was blown in half by Laurie at the end of the 2007 HALLOWEEN, and scarcely makes much of an appearance in this movie. Michael Myers is a disheveled drifter, literally haunted by his past, whose only real aim is to find a place to belong. It’s sort of funny, in retrospect: When John Carpenter made the first HALLOWEEN, he-by-way-of-Dr. Loomis declared Michael an empty shell of a person, someone who was simply born evil, as reflected by the empty-eyed mask he wears. For some reason, though, a whole legacy of directors just couldn’t resist trying to explain Myers away. The original HALLOWEEN II then says, “Well...what if Michael Myers is on a rampage because LAURIE STRODE IS HIS SISTER? What’s that you say? Why is that a reason to rampage? Ummmm...” And then HALLOWEEN 4 sees him pursuing other young female relations of his, and then in subsequent movies there’s an accursed rune, and druids, and immortality rites, and by the time you get to HALLOWEEN 6 you have this absurd stone soup of bad ideas. It’s a miracle that this franchise became such a thing. Rob Zombie makes the same fundamental mistake, but at least he tries it in the simplest possible way, asserting plainly that Nurture, not Nature, made Michael into a killer. Now, terminally lonely, he’s like a clown waking up in his trailer to find that the carnival left without him. Exiled from mainstream society, he seeks out what remains of his family, who, due to his own violent actions, has grown up more like him than he may have imagined.

I’m not saying I think this was the best thing to do with HALLOWEEN 2. Personally, what I crave in horror movies is something that is farther beyond explanation than this--something that gesturally resembles my life experience, but that plunges past the veil of mundanity into a deeper, darker world of primordial fears and urges, addressing things that unsettle me because I cannot rationalize them. For me, horror is definitionally incomprehensible, and Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN diptych is fundamentally sane. But, I think what I’ve discovered is that these movies are not proper horror movies, in spite of their relentless sadistic violence. They are outlaw fables, with more DNA in common with something like EASY RIDER, than with FRIDAY THE 13TH. It’s funny to watch myself coming to a compassionate understanding of these movies that are themselves about outsiders and rejects who are specifically deprived of understanding. My goal in all this was not so much to convince people of the value of these movies, which one might reject on any number of reasonable counts, but to explain to myself why I keep coming back to them. It isn’t to condescendingly heckle them, and it isn’t just because they’re often handsome-looking, or because they’re so emotionally authentic even when the narrative is less than compelling. It must be because, even when I’ve found him challenging, I can’t help seeing Rob Zombie as a person with vision, someone who heroically eschews common consensus on taste and sense-making--the consensus even among horror fans and his own cinematic heroes--in order to say what makes sense to him personally. Finally, he has begun to make sense to me, too.

[timemachineyeah]

Should I keep my old Sailor Moon DVDs for collectory reasons, or get rid of them because I have the superior blu rays now?

HM.