The Halloween List: Ghoul & Erased

Previously: Thelma, Annihilation, and The Endless

We're taking a brief break from movies today to spotlight two Horror miniseries. One is from India, about terrors occult and governmental. The other is an anime that brings terror into Time Travel. Need something to binge this Saturday?

Ghoul (2018)

In a dystopic future, India has divided into multiple states, some secular, and some religious, cracking down with strict censorship rules. It’s all intended to reduce terrorism and general violence. It has all failed, and the fascistic government continues burning children’s books and searching random civilians to send to black site prisons. Ghoul takes place at one of those black site prisons, where the latest prisoner and interrogation subject has more than knowledge. He’s possessed by a demon that wanted to get in.

It feels like an overdue topic for Horror, which prides itself on grasping reality’s sharp edges. Black sites are real nightmares, scarier than any serial killer. The prospect of the torture crew that runs such a place being mentally toyed with and haunted by an invasive presence could carry its own movie. The tensest scenes are brilliantly constructed, like a power outage during which one worker tries to see around a torture chamber with the minuscule illumination of a blow torch. The show has ample tricks to fill up its few episodes, building to an ending that had my little group cheering.

True Stories of John: The Prison Transport

I’d just picked up a friend from the train. Let’s call her Gladys, because it’s a nice name and I don’t want to give her real one out. We rolled down the hill in my little Camry and onto the small concrete bridge. At the end was a stop light, with just one vehicle paused there. It was a white transport, like a short bus for school, but with state and police markings.

Waiting behind them, Gladys and I chatted idly about her job search. We looked around my empty car, to the stone walls that artistically lined either side of the bridge, and at the overcast sky. Anywhere but the police transport in front of us. There was a mix of that awkwardness about looking into other people’s cars, and the intimidation of police.

Eventually the light turned green and the transport remained at the intersection. I frowned at the transport. Then Gladys asked something.

“Is there anybody in there?”

I craned my neck and looked through their rear windows. You could see up the aisle of padded benches. There was no one in sight, even on the driver’s side. I stuck my head out the window and noticed the driver’s side door was open. So was the passenger’s exit. The transport simply sat there, engine off, under the grey light of an overcast day.

“Where do you think they went?” I asked. I didn’t have many ideas.

Gladys shifted in her seat, trying to see over the stone wall to our right. It was only a couple feet away, and only a couple feet high. On the other side was a slope leading to the river. My imagination, being my best friend, and best friends very often playing horrible tricks on you, suggested a serial killer crouched on the other side of the wall, lying in wait for a dumb enough local to get out of his car.

Gladys asked, “Should we wait?”

I didn’t know what to answer. Could you pull around a police transport? Was this a traffic sting? I felt like, at best, I would leave this intersection with a ticket.

The light went yellow, then red. No one came back. No driver, no maniac, no state troopers escorting a convict after letting him take a leak. We sat there behind this hulking vehicle, until the light turned green again.

Gladys developed this magnificent two-face act. She would look at the transport and seem pathetically nervous, then look at me like this was no big deal and I should go. She swapped between the looks dissociative brilliance. No argument had to be made; she quietly convinced me that something awful was waiting around here and we should let it be.

I gave in and pulled us around the left side of the transport. We looked through all the windows. No one was there. The driver’s side door was gaping open, and we could see through to the side of the road and the grassy hill on the other side. I turned us onto the main road and looked down the hill, expecting to see some explanation. There was no one there. We didn’t even see another car on the road for another ten miles.

There was nothing about it in the paper the next day or blotter report that weekend. I asked a couple of people who were in local law enforcement, but nobody knew what I was talking about. I never found out what was going on that day.

Bathroom Monologue: Comfort is a Tricky Thing

Chishee wasn't comfortable with the staff's scheme. She hired succubae because of the cultural biases against them, not so they could eat the hotel's clientele for tips. The only reason she hid their covert buffet of debauchery was that, if exposed, she'd go to prison with them. The succubae rationalized to Chishee that they only took on suicidal clients, giving them the happy endings they all craved. They let her keep all the room fees, and when she still deliberated on turning them in, offered her a cut of their blood money. That, she flatly refused. Attendance rose from its prior flatness, though, so that she could barely keep rooms open, or the dumpsters out back empty. It was a moral quagmire for the intrepid hotel owner. Her reservations had truly grown.

Bathroom Monologue: Guilty, Not Guilty

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I don’t see how you can find Nidia guilty. The smallest crime the Prosecution allows will put her in prison for ten years. That is ten years of abuse by guards, cruelty and politics with inmates, an infectious drug culture, and deprivation from the outside world. Inmates are astronomically more likely to commit crimes once they leave jail. Prisons are devastating environments where innocence is shredded. You can’t fix them from the jury box, but you can decide who belongs there.

What is she supposed to learn in jail? That leaving an infant unattended can be fatal? You’ve seen her and heard from her psychiatrist. She needed to spend the first two weeks of this trial under restraints. She learned what was wrong before she turned herself in. There’s nothing to reform about her. There’s nothing about our prison system that is going to make her less likely to harm a child again. She can’t even look at one without going into hysterics.

The Prosecution will not cut a deal. I’m not legally allowed to speculate on the quotas for convictions that is causing him to refuse a plea bargain, but Nidia needs psychiatric care and compassion. Some of you may not want to feel for this woman, and want to punish her for the death she’s caused. She broke one of the most sacred trusts in life: that of a mother to her child. That she’s already suffering doesn’t allay your outrage, and I understand that. But if you convict this broken woman, you are creating a criminal. If you don’t, you’re giving her a chance to one day be able to look at a child without sobbing.

That’s the choice you’ve got today.