You may have noticed that the Showcase Blog was a little quiet last week, and it's not without good reason: We are thrilled to be able to bring you the all-new Showcase Video Centre, now live at showcase.ca/video.

We pay attention to what you do while you're here, so we know that you really like catching up on your favourite Showcase Original series and hit international shows at showcase.ca. This fall, we'll have full episodes of Lost Girl, Burn Notice, Rescue Me and Weeds available the day after broadcast, along with our huge library from years past.

Also, for the first time, some of our programming is embeddable -- which means that you'll be able to drop it into your own blog and/or Facebook page. Look for the small 'embed' button on selected videos, so you can do stuff like this:

You can also use built-in Facebook functionality to tell your grandparents that you 'like' something called "Who Can 69 The Longest?" 

OK. Now go watch everything.

When The Blair Witch Project appeared on the scene back in 1999 the whole first person / found footage / mock-documentary style was sneered at in many quarters, and viewed -- quite correctly -- as a gimmick used to hide a number of other limitations while selling the budget shortcomings to audiences as a benefit rather than a flaw. It's a feature, not a flaw! And when the gimmick worked -- and worked spectacularly well, I might add -- the only real surprise was that other film makers didn't jump on it sooner. But while the copycats took longer to arrive than expected they did, indeed, arrive and with global successes such as Spanish zombie film [REC] -- remade in the US as Quarantine -- and Paranormal Activity a little closer to home, it's pretty clear that what was once a novelty has taken on a life of its own and become a legitimate sub-genre of its own. And make note of this: In the hands of The Last Exorcism director Daniel Stamm the style ceases to be a gimmick and becomes an integral part of the film itself. Cleverly constructed and captured to film by a very talented cast and crew, the decision to go mock-doc on The Last Exorcism is not just about keeping the budget down but about capturing the essence of what the film is really about in the most effective way. Shoot it differently and you'd have an entirely different and, in my opinion, a much less interesting film.

Because, you see, The Last Exorcism does not just want to scare you. It wants to do that, too, and does so quite well when it chooses to go down that road but there is much more going on here than your typical bump and crash, shock-a-moment film. It's worth knowing that the film was originally titled Cotton, after its lead character Cotton Marcus, and while that's absolutely a crap title for a film it tells you something very important about where its creators originally saw the center of the thing being. The exorcism may be the part of the film that will draw crowds to the theater but it's Cotton who gives this thing some lasting resonance.

Played brilliantly by veteran character actor Patrick Fabian -- you've seen him in one-offs on countless TV shows -- the Reverend Cotton Marcus is a fraud. Raised from childhood to be a preacher of the fire and brimstone variety, one available to roam the country and perform exorcisms for those believed to be demon-possessed, Cotton not only followed the path laid out for him but excelled at it for years. He's intelligent, he's passionate, he's charismatic. He's the sort of person you just immediately want to like and trust and follow. The problem is that late in his career he realized that he didn't really believe anymore. He'd never really believed in the exorcisms as anything other than a sort of placebo for the people who believe in them, performing elaborate rituals for his flock's mental well-being rather than their spiritual well-being, but now he has realized that his entire faith is hollow. And so he sets out, with the help of a documentary crew, to expose his own fraud using the case of young Nell -- a sheltered teenage girl in Louisiana -- as a demonstration of how to fake an exorcism with the full extent of the charade caught on camera. Things do not end up going as he expects.

What plays out in The Last Exorcism is an effective horror picture, true. It brings scares enough to send audiences home happy. But it's also more. On an intimate, character level it is the story of one man caught between faith and reason. On a larger scale it can be seen as an allegory for Red and Blue America, two cultures in one country with radically different beliefs and priorities with both sides casually disregarding the others beliefs at their own peril. The characters are remarkably nuanced, even the minor ones, and the treatment of the underlying issues remarkably balanced and respectful of all positions. There's no pat 'this side good, that side bad' grandstanding here -- all of the players are sincere, all of them may be correct, and all of them are caught up in something far larger than they understand.

The doc format gives the film a remarkable sense of intimacy. It feels like a portrait of actual people, a feeling bolstered both by Stamm's working methods -- he encouraged actor input and improvisation while reportedly shooting scenes as many as twenty or thirty times, until the actors forgot the camera was there -- and the one hundred percent, absolute and complete absence of CGI on screen. If you see it, it's real. I can't remember the last time I saw a genre film that could claim that and it's hard to sum up just how big a difference it can make.

While not a perfect film -- there's a sort of double ending that's going to drive some people crazy -- The Last Exorcism is a damn good one, one that I think is going to find a very well-deserved long term following.

Perhaps one of the most audacious adaptations of the works of Stephen King is Haven, a new Showcase Original series about a somewhat haunted female FBI agent and some very strange shenanigans in small-town Maine. The audacity stems from the fact that Haven is loosely based on King’s 2005 crime novella The Colorado Kid—a novella notable for being about an unsolvable mystery that indeed remains unexplained at story’s end. Herewith, a series of blogs examining the hows, wherefores and whys concerning various adaptations of Stephen King’s works. Adaptation is a slippery skill, and those who play with it often change not just the rules but the game itself, as the residents of a small town called Haven, and a dead guy nicknamed ‘Colorado,’ know all too well…

Haven Blog, Part 4:
YOU ARE MY SON, SHINING, MY ONLY SON, SHINING
by Gary Butler

As Haven episodes go, “Fur” and “Sketchy,” airing tonight at 10pm ET/PT, are two of the better stories in terms of high-concept supernatural powers—animals as remote-controlled killers, an artist’s sketchpad that can affect reality—but are admittedly limited by their FX budgets. While CGI has come a long way over the last couple of decades, it still has a long way to go; computers require direction and creativity from those programming them, and can’t just give us cool imagery at the touch of a button (as “Sketchy” demonstrates: art needs artists).

Perhaps it is the subject matter of animals in “Fur” that brings to mind Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of The Shining, adapted from Stephen King’s 1977 horror classic about a haunted hotel. In one very effective section of King’s novel, young hero (and psychic) Danny Torrance wanders into one of the hotel’s grand gardens, where hedges have been clipped in the shapes of various animals. With each step Danny takes deeper into the garden, he hears a shuffling sound, over his shoulder—but whenever he turns around for a look, everything is still. Before long, he realizes not only that the animals are converging on him, but also that they can only move when he is not looking at them.

It’s a powerfully claustrophobic scene in a powerfully agoraphobic novel. The topiary animals apparently would have cost an, ahem, king’s ransom for director Kubrick to adapt to film, given the limitations of special effects in that era; there is also a valid argument that multiple stances for multiple animals would have proven costly in terms of mere time investment, all for a sequence that would barely last minutes. And, as the otherwise-excellent 2007 episode “Blink” from the Dr. Who TV series proved, to sculpt only a handful of the monsters—in this case, statues of weeping angels—and then try to suggest movement by filming the creatures from different angles is practical, but ineffective. In the end, Kubrick instead used a ten-foot-tall hedge maze (in which film crew members are reported to have become lost, themselves).

Much has been made of King’s dismissal of Kubrick’s film, even if that opinion has softened over time. Regardless, it was the first adaptation to cause the author to feel protective of his works in the hands of other creators and other media—an interesting take on the father-son relationship that is central to the novel itself.

It’s also worth noting that when King approved a second adaptation of The Shining, for TV in 1997, the hedge animals were back. Critics and fans largely agreed, though, that the animals were less effective because they were actually shown moving, via overhead camera shots; sinister, sure, but not full-on, back-turned, nowhere-to-run scary.

Back to Haven: “Fur” is a fun, X-Files-ish episode—really, isn’t this the case with all of the episodes in this series?—and it scores extra creative points for vesting a local taxidermist in an EC-style horror situation (as in, 1950s comic books such as Tales from the Crypt, which was a major influence on King and the subject of his 1982 homage film Creepshow).

Still, “Fur’s” finale could have packed a bit more visual punch; maybe they should have used static hedge animals instead? As well, the over-arching mystery of the potential father-daughter relationship between FBI agent Parker and the ‘Colorado Kid’ has failed to evolve for many consecutive episodes now. With only six episodes remaining, there’s no doubt whatsoever that the Kid’s story will finally come to the forefront, and soon. Given King’s take on Kubrick’s Shining, though, and the fact that his novella, The Colorado Kid, is the source of inspiration for the show, this can only be a good thing for all concerned—the viewers in particular.

TWO WEEKS FROM NOW, Haven Blog #5: EC DOES IT—STEPHEN KING AND HORROR COMIC BOOKS