I’ve been thinking a bit about horror and the role of fear in entertainment some lately (more to come later this week once I finish reading Drood and processing some insights left over from The Walking Dead) since bad nightmares have generally lead me to avoid art that viscerally frightens me. But one exception in the past couple of years, as I’ve tried to push my own boundaries, is The Devil in the White City. For those of you unfamiliar but seeking to avoid spoilers, it’s the story of an extremely prolific and macabre serial killer who operated during the Chicago World’s Fair. And it is scary.

It’ll be very, very interesting to see what it looks like for Leonardo DiCaprio to play said extremely prolific and macabre serial killer. If the movie sticks to the historical facts of the case, and to the book based on it, it’s going to be an extraordinarily hard role to turn into a sympathetic, or at least understandable to an audience, Hannibal Lecter-type killer. H.H. Holmes may have been charming to his victims, but there’s no particular evidence, at least that I remember, that he was more broadly charismatic, or that he performed any particular act of justice that could counterbalance his crimes. In that case, it’ll definitely be a new step for DiCaprio to play someone almost entirely unsympathetic, even repulsive and horrifying. I’ll be curious to see if he loses weight or wears prosthetics for the role—that’s a famous, and famously attractive face and physique he’ll be committing to new ends.

Given the slight Sense and Sensibility kick I’m on, I was a bit concerned about the upcoming modernization of the series with a Latina twist, From Prada to Nada. Fortunately, we’ve got a trailer I can agonize over:

I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about this. Sure, the main characters before they lose their money have more in common with the novel’s social climbers, and they’re a bit unfortunately stereotypical.

But I do think the decision to make the movie focus more clearly on the sisters’ adaptation to their new lives is smart. In the novel, the characters essentially get rescued from poverty after a brief hiatus: their virtue and charm rescues them from any serious reconciliation with poverty. Here, it’s not just reduced circumstances, but ethnic identity (and with it, work ethic and a lack of wastefulness) that the characters have to come to understand, and to understand in a way that’s part of their core values and self-expression. I have no particular personal insight on whether this is a sensitive, or stereotypical, portrait of urban Latino family life, but the “immigration!” jokes and references to Latino gangs seem to be executed in a reasonably understated way so far—this reads more like Ugly Betty than Our Family Wedding to me, at least in extremely condensed form.

I think a slightly more complicated take on identity is probably worth the sacrifice of the more byzantine romantic subplots which, rooted as they are in a time when large parts of the aristocracy simply didn’t work, and adults were far more financially dependent on their parents, probably wouldn’t translate well to the screen. Modernization is the easy part—it’s finding a truly appropriate translation and transmogrification that’s hard.

Are any of you watching The Walking Dead? I braved my extreme fear of horror movies and bodily grossness to watch the first three episodes of the show for a big piece about the Western tradition, the Civil War’s role in it, and the series’ similarities to Gone With The Wind at The Atlantic on Friday:

The essence of a Western is the void and the the unpleasant things that lurk in it. Sometimes that void is physical emptiness: the stretch of land between a man and a train he desperately wants to catch, a remote graveyard where no one will know or care if you dig. And sometimes the vacancy is moral, a place where men and woman have passed beyond the rule of law, and the rule of law scrabbles to regain its hold.Deadwood is such a place, as is the San Francisco of Dirty Harry. To create a void like that today, film and television artists have three choices. They can go back in time, as the Coen brothers are doing in their remake of True Grit. They can find contemporary echoes of past lawlessness, as FX did with neo-Nazism and moonshine on Justified. Or they can scour the landscape with an apocalypse and literally recreate the sparsely populated North American continent. Only this time, the Indians are victims too, and the predators are monsters.

It’s this third choice that’s been most popular recently in books like The Passage and Year Zero, and movies like Monsters. The Walking Dead is situated squarely, and consciously, in the same tradition. From the moment Rick Grimes (the excellent Andrew Lincoln, utterly transcending his sweet blandness in the role he’s best known for in Love, Actually) awakens—gut-shot, in an abandoned hospital, only to find the parking lot full of executed corpses, a vivisected body crawling through a neighborhood lawn and his family gone—we’re waiting for him to shower, get back in uniform and ten-gallon hat, and mount a horse headed back to Atlanta.

Anyway, despite the fact that it’s not directly up my alley, the show is a considerable and impressive work. I’m considering checking out the comics (my understanding is that they follow a fairly familiar pattern of authoritarianism in extreme crisis) for further reference—any recommendations as to whether I should or shouldn’t?