Cant’ Look Away | The SunBreak

Yeah, there’s lots of great stuff out there this weekend. Go see some of it already.

Tonight:

Welcome to Doe Bay Documentary fundraiser with Frank Fairfield, Rusty Willoughby, and guests @ Columbia City Theater. $15 at the door. Doors at 6pm.

Forget a notion as superficial as “retro”: California fiddler/banjoist/singer Frank Fairfield‘s wonderfully bare-bones traditional music sounds like it belongs in an ancient flatbed truck, tooling along a John Steinbeck countryside. And with the success of his recent solo CD/roots project Cobirds Unite, you can now officially take the word “unsung” out of the phrase, “Seattle’s best unsung singer/songwriter” when talking about Rusty Willoughby. CCT’s promising some super-special surprise guests, too. Tonight’s show benefits fundraising efforts on behalf of the documentary feature in-the-works, Welcome to Doe Bay (you can find their Kickstarter page here).

Lesbian, La Otracina, The Great Society Mind Destroyers, Hypatia Lake @ The Comet. $10 at the door. Doors at 9pm.

Who’da thunk you could get so many shades of loud and trippy in one night? Seattle’s own Hypatia Lake remain one of this ‘burg’s finest shoegazer outfits, and the mighty Lesbian brings the prog-metal with epic follow-through and a cloud of Stygian Black Lotus. Highlight of this bill, however, could well be The Great Society Mind Destroyers, a fab Chicago psych-rock combo who rock their effects pedals like Rambo rocks his bandanna and bandoliers. Bring your earplugs, and expect a contact high–with or without your own recreational aids.

Saturday:

The Wombats, The Postelles, The Static Jacks @ The Crocodile. $12 advance. Doors at 8pm.

Get your short, sharp guitar pop fix at the Croc Saturday night. The Wombats, three cute British lads packing Buzzcocks directness in a youthful package, headline, but The Postelles and the Static Jacks deliver similar energy and hooks with just as much spirit.

Vampires vs. Werewolves: THEESatisfaction, Knowmads, Dyno Jamz, DJ Darwin @ EMP. $7 EMP members/$10 general public. Doors at 7:30pm.

I woulda killed for all-ages shows this cool when I was a kid back in the pleistocene era. Fresh-faced youth can check out the EMP’s terrific Can’t Look Away horror film exhibit and hear a dizzying array of local hip-hop from retro-space-age lounge divas THEESatisfaction, jazz-friendly collective Dyno Jamz, and straightahead crew Knowmads .

Sunday:

White City Graves, Iron Mic, guests @ The High Dive. $6 at the door, doors at 8pm.

White City Graves hail from stout punk-rock stock: The band includes former members of Slop Shots, Lee Rude and the Trainwrecks, and I Fergit. The sounds generated by this current conglomerate, though, lean more towards the grinding garage-rock end of things. Think The Cramps and the Misfits with a little bit of Social-Distortion working-stiff elbow grease, and you’re on the right track.

M83, Active Child @Neumos. $15 advance, SOLD OUT. Doors at 6pm and 9:15pm.

M83 handily sold out not one, but two Neumos sets, so I’m obviously not the only person out there in thrall to their epic electro-shoegazer sound. Expect Anthony Gonzalez and crew to emphasize their fine, eighties-tinged new long-player, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming this tour. If you’re lucky enough to possess (or are able to score) a ticket to either show, though, keep your fingers crossed that the doomed romance of “Don’t Save Us from the Flames” rears its darkly-swoonsome head.

[‘Tis the season for all things spooky and sinister, so expect SunBreak Music Editor Tony Kay to be throwing on his informal mantle of Resident B-Movie/Horror Film Evangelist frequently this month-ed.]

Just in time for the Hallow-days, EMP vaults squarely into the exquisite abyss of horror cinema with Can’t Look Away: The Lure of Horror Film, the museum’s latest exhibit. The presentation opened October 2, and happily it gets an awful lot right–whether you’re a horror hardcore or a shuddering terror neophyte.

Exhibit curator Jacob McMurray scored a major coup by securing some highly-qualified help. Veteran B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman, American Werewolf in London director John Landis, and Hostel director Eli Roth cherry-picked the influential horror movies forming the presentation’s nucleus, and these guys know their stuff. Corman’s got nearly sixty(!) years of experience as a producer/director of genre flicks to draw from, and Landis and Roth are both dyed-in-the-wool fanboys with encyclopaedic knowledge to back up their filmmaking chops (no pun intended). Masters of Horror co-creator and film director Mick Garris also served as a consultant.

The broad demographic of these men reflects positively in Can’t Look Away, which chronicles the last one-hundred years of horror cinema’s evolution with a resolutely even hand. Seldom does the twain of expressionistic silent horror afficionado and Saw-loving gorehound meet in geekdom, but EMP’s creation does its best to trace those pathways coherently, without feeling like it’s pandering too extremely to any one demographic. The horror timeline along one exhibit wall follows cultural and historic shifts that coincided with the releases of many of Can’t Look Away‘s selected horror movies. And the helpful monster classification chart on one wall is as funny as it is creepy.

The memorabilia on display covers a huge swath, with something to make most any fan salivate among the couple-dozen items. It’s hard not to be awed by the oldest piece–the original, unbound typewritten manuscript for Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (initially titled The Un-Dead). And if it’s flashy-scary you want, the original Alien costume from Alien and Freddy Krueger’s blade-encrusted glove beckon.

An American Werewolf in London display at EMP. — The Coolest Model Kit You'll Ever See: An American Werewolf in London, homaged by the EMP. (photo by Tony Kay)

Seeing some of the items, up close and under glass, alternately demystifies and inspires an onlooker. I cultivated a deep and abiding love for the Universal Golden Age horror flicks of the 1930’s and ’40’s as a kid, so viewing the iconic cane head ornament from the 1941 version of The Wolf Man feels like the horror-nerd equivalent of peeking at the original Dead Sea Scrolls. The piece looks like what it is–a humbly-carved wooden figure of a wolf, no longer than two cigarette lighters–but it spins a dark spell that defies its modest origins.

Kudos to the exhibit’s designers, who get a lot of visual mileage out of atmospherically-backlit slats of black foam. In a wonderfully geeky touch, they’ve also created giant wall mounts that look like plastic trays from old monster model kits. Kiosks in the middle of the exhibit showcase mini-documentaries on a handful of the selected films, with the exhibit’s famous consultants (as well as other filmmakers and journalists) waxing rhapsodic and academic about each movie’s genesis and impact.

The interactive portions of Can’t Look Away include a Scream Booth and an incredibly fun Philip Worthington installation called Shadow Monsters. In the latter, museumgoers watch their silhouettes morph into sometimes whimsical, sometimes horrific distortions of themselves. It’s the kind of headtrip that could keep a stoner fixating on the shadow of his right hand for hours.

Can’t Look Away‘s minimal faults seem rooted in the exhibit’s time and space limitations. A few of the props on display look cool, but aren’t given context to justify their presence (yeah, the split-skulled demon from Constantine looks great, but it’s a prop from an unremarkable Keanu Reeves flick, for God’s sake). And the mini-documentaries screening in the kiosks are so good, they make you wish there were a lot more of ’em.

All told, though, McMurray and his team have crafted a solid exhibit that ably balances genre basics with die-hard geek fodder. And that’s a special effect as impressive as anything you’ll see in any horror film.