#hjortsberg

[soulsanitarium]

Angel Heart (1987) dir. by Alan Parker is based on the novel Falling Angel (1979) by William Hjortsberg. It was also adapted into an opera. The sequel Angel’s Inferno was published posthumous in 2020.

👹According to Nette (2020) the original novel was supposedly influenced by Benét’s 1936 short story, ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’, about a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil and is defended by Daniel Webster, a fictional take of the famous 19th century American statesman and lawyer.

However, I would think that as Krzywinska (2000) has said this is a version of the Faust story, so it is hundreds of years old. It would be interesting to find out why the European Faust folklore has settled into blues myths, such as the story of Robert Johnson🎸

🕵️‍♂️Angel Heart’s strength derives from how its fuses the familiar noir trope of the hard-drinking gumshoe who takes an apparently simple case that warps into something far more complex and dangerous, with a genuinely disturbing horror element. (Nette 2020)

👄Equally, the story contains material like the myth of Oedipus. It was quite a scandal when one of the "Cosby children" was f*** on the screen in a bloody rain as voodoo priestess Epiphany (with her father).

✝️The film Angel Heart is somewhat interested in the origins of voodoo (vodoun, hoodoo). However, the emphasis is on the symbols of Christianity. Voodoo is in this movie simply a Devil’s tool. This is also the effectiveness of the film. No voodoo dolls and zombies here🧟

🎶What I love in this movie is what Krzywinska (2000) has stated: ”The film rarely spells things out explicit, and in the main operates through association, and this is the principle that guides the connection between voodoo and Satanism.” Only Satanic perhaps? I also love the use of music in this movie. Blues, gospel, voodoo drums, lonely untuned piano and spiritual church music mixed with jazz saxophone and heartbeat sounds❤️

Sources:

Nette, Andrew. 2020. The long, dark… crimereads.com

Krzywinska, Tanya. 2000. Skin for Dancing In.

[shesarainbow]

favourite moments from Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg

[80smovies]

[thatwritererinoriordan]

Sexualizing Harry Houdini? In MY current read? It's my likely than you think!

[jlcomicsandgames]

William Hjortsberg Falling Angel, Gray Matters

[williemeikle]

Book Review Angels Inferno by William Hjortsberg

[zerotosixty]

Fernando Alonso’s hazel eyes appreciation post

2023 f1 preseason / andre breton, surrealism and painting / 2003 canadian grand prix / angela carter, the erl-king / f1 racing magazine november 2015 / jeanette winterson, gut symmetries / wiliam hjortsberg, falling angel / 2010 abu dhabi grand prix / anna akhmatova, selected poems: by the shore / 2009 australian grand prix / anaïs nin, the unexpurgated diary of anaïs nin 1931-1932 / 2013 canadian grand prix / yvan goll, always at the hour of morning sun / 2012 united states grand prix / sandra cisneros, woman hollering creek / aston martin db12 teaser

[monsterasia-zero]

The Cinema Movie Of The Week - Legend

Directed By Ridley Scott

Story By William Hjortsberg

Starring Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry

Music By Tangerine Dream (U.S.)

Distributed By Universal Pictures (U.S.)

Release Date April 18, 1985 (U.S.)

Country United States

[memetaped]

falling angel taken from the 1978 william hjortsberg book.

mad? goddamned right i’m mad.

don’t crap around with me.

and when these pictures are developed, i’ll have something in my scrapbook to remember you by.

you can’t buy off pain. not with all the money in the world.

i’m hurt. i feel all busted up inside.

child, answer me.

hungry? there’s a pot of coffee made and eggs in the fridge.

looks like someone did a pretty good job on you.

if you can’t defend yourself, you’re lost.

this is a city of outsiders.

someone’s pulling your leg.

beats me, bud.

i’m an accessory, all right. i’ve been an accessory all my life.

why don’t you sit down and drink your milk and we’ll have a nice, long talk.

you’re playing me for a sap.

i can see you’re all broken up about it.

cream or lemon, my dear?

sooner you go, sooner you’ll be back.

if you weren’t such an old fart, i’d bust you up like a soda cracker.

you tell me, since you know all about it.

[sorbetscript]

william hjortsberg, legend (1985) screenplay / hannibal 2.13 "mizumono"

[lionofchaeronea]

orange, squash and rainy? ^-^

Orange: Do you prefer to stay indoors on Halloween or do you enjoy attending parties? I'd rather stay indoors and read a good ghost story or two. A party animal I am not.

Squash: Are there any traditions you participate in this time of year? If I can find it, I generally watch Ghostwatch, the marvelous pseudo-documentary that the BBC aired on Halloween night in 1992. And, of course, there's the annual viewing(s) of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, followed in due season by A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Rainy: What's your favorite scary book or movie? Why?

Oh, so much to choose from here. I'll restrain myself and pick one each.

Book: Falling Angel by Wiliam Hjortsberg. A brilliant and terrifying blend of hard-boiled detective fiction and supernatural horror, with a twist ending that hits like a Mack truck. (Adapted into the film Angel Heart with Mickey Rourke and Robert de Niro.)

Movie: The Seventh Victim (1943). A young woman looking for her missing sister discovers that Greenwich Village is host to a Satanic cult with a very special breed of malice. One of a string of masterful low-budget horrors that Val Lewton produced for RKO in the 1940s, eschewing gore in favor of nigh-unbearable tension. Features an ending that's absolutely perfect and so bleak I'm still amazed it made it past the censors.

[vickramediwan]

Book Review #7 Angel's Inferno - William #Hjortsberg  

“When the Devil laughs the whole damn world laughs with Him” – from the novel Amazing sequel to one of the most shocking books of all time #Angel’sInferno is a worthy sequel to #FallingAngel, a speedy thriller with a shocking end. The genius of William Hjortsberg is that he’s oh-so-unpredictable and smashes your head against a brick wall at 100 miles per hour. In the last few pages, you hit the…

[thatwritererinoriordan]

After many such early mornings spent waiting and watching, whenever he was back in New York between speaking engagements, the knight wondered if his doubts were indeed justified. The spectre made no reappearance.

Perhaps it had been nothing more than the aftereffects of a bit of undigested beef, as Scrooge suggested upon first discerning his dead partner's features staring dolefully at him from off the door-knocker. Marley's ghost was no figment of the miser's indigestion. On he came, dragging his chains and ledgers.

Sir Arthur rubbed his eyes. What was he thinking of? Investing fictional characters with a reality even Dickens never intended. He suppressed a laugh. His detractors would have a field day with such thoughts as these. How they ridiculed him when he spoke of his belief in fairies, leprechauns, and other wee folks. Not that he blamed them. It did all sound preposterous, until one considered the evidence.

[latestmoviesblog]

Legend (1985) – The EOFFTV Review

As you might expect from a film by Ridley Scott, Legend is a gorgeous looking film, the director’s meticulous attention to detail creating a nicely realised fantasy world like few others before it. However… Those who have accused Scott – with some justification – of making films that are more style than substance will find plenty of ammunition here. William Hjortsberg’s screenplay is the very…

[thehorrortree]

            In 1978 William Hjortsberg produced a novel based on one of those ideas so obvious that you wonder why it hadn’t been done before.   The novel was Falling Angel, and Hjortsberg innovatively combined the hard-boiled detective genre with the horror one, or as Stephen King so aptly put it, the result was  if “Raymond Chandler wrote The Exorcist.” Like skilled horror writers, Hjortsberg grounds the novels in realism.  Harry Angel (every character has a unique and revealing name) is a private eye in 1959 New York who is hired by a bizarre character named Louis Cyphre to find a missing pre-World War II crooner named Johnny Favorite.  Cyphre enigmatically wants to collect on a debt Favorite owed Cyphre for helping the singer with his career. Like Dashiell Hammett, Hjortsberg uses super specificity as well as the slumming,  poetic qualities of Raymond Chandler.  Every character and setting, even what Angel eats, is minutely described, and like Philip Marlowe, Angel walks over graves and discovers a greater crime than what he is tasked with investigating. The tropes of Hammett and Chandler are present.  Angel is blackjacked by hired thugs and threatened by bent cops.  But Hjjortsberg breathes new life into them with an admirably restrained sense of a lurking conspiracy.   Religion abounds in Angel’s journey, and it is not the Sermon on the Mount version.   Angel witnesses Voodoo rituals (in Central Park of all places) and Black Masses—the worship of Satan that always begins with a  living sacrifice and ends with an orgy—are carried out in abandoned subway tunnels.  The people Angel encounters during his investigation are stepped into Black Magic.  Voodoo high priestesses, practicing witches, and Satanists populate the novel. The more Angel learns about Favorite; the more sinister the latter is revealed to be.  Favorite was obsessed with all forms of Black Magic, and those who knew him call him the most evil person they had ever met. Still gory by today’s standards, the murders in Falling Angel are horrific.  Hearts are ripped out of bodies, genitals cut off and inserted into mouths to those Angel interviews. But everything remains in the realm of the possible until the novel’s jolting conclusion.  To describe the ending would ruin the experience.  Suffice it to say, Hjortsberg takes the standard noir conclusion of the protagonist being doomed from the start and turns it on its head. In 1987, Alan Parker adapted Falling Angel into the film Angel Heart starring a young Mickey Rourke.  Parker, who wrote the script, improves on the novel in several ways.   Rourke is even more of a rat in a trap than in the novel.  Rourke is plagued by nightmares and flashbacks where what he is remembering is just out of reach.  Unlike Hjortsberg, who kept the novel in New York (the novel often reads as a travel brochure of Manhattan), Parker cleverly situated the film in New Orleans, the most appropriate setting for Black Magic.  Cyphre, chillingly played by Robert De Niro, toys with Angel from the beginning, and creepily comes across as a father figure to Angel.   What works the best in the film is that, unlike the novel, with its realistic base, there is no ambiguity about who Cyphre really is. That said, Falling Angel holds up surprisingly well, and noir would never be the same after it.  Not even James Ellroy, at his most perverted, approaches the horrors of the novel. About The Novel: Edgar Award Finalist: The hunt for a vanished singer leads a detective into the depths of the occult in this “terrific” novel (Stephen King). Big-band frontman Johnny Favorite was singing for the troops when a Luftwaffe fighter squadron strafed the bandstand, killing the crowd and leaving the singer near death. The army returned him to a private hospital in upstate New York, leaving him to live out his days as a vegetable while the world forgot him. But Louis Cyphre never forgets. Cyphre had a contract with the singer, stipulating

payment upon Johnny’s death—payment that will be denied as long as Johnny clings to life. When Cyphre hires private investigator Harry Angel to find Johnny at the hospital, Angel learns that the singer has disappeared. It is no ordinary missing-person’s case. Everyone he questions dies soon after, as Angel’s investigation ensnares him in a bizarre tangle of black magic, carnival freaks, and grisly voodoo. When the sinister Louis Cyphre begins appearing in Angel’s dreams, the detective fears for his life, his sanity, and his soul. Falling Angel was the basis for the Alan Parker film Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, and Lisa Bonet. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Hjortsberg including rare photos from the author’s personal collection. Available on Amazon.

[80smovies]