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I have a pair of beige corduroy pants that had its beginnings as olive green. I’ve been wearing it almost everyday since 2004, more out of necessity than fashion concerns, it being the only pair of pants I’ve found to be comfortable to wear regardless of my girth. Of course, wearing it continuously (and the regular launderings) has worn it and torn it literally to shreds, with only patches and fragments of cloth keeping it in its somewhat pants-shaped form, stitched into place by my mother. She checks it out once a week, looking for new holes and tears in the fragile fabric, trying to find them while in their shy infancy before they blossom into wide-open display windows of candid meatmarket fleshfeast.
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Late 2006, Vim Nadera walks into the ICW and, upon finding me, points to my tattered corduroys, says: “Aba, binigyan mo ako ng ideya, a! Magpagawa nga ako ng pantalon na ganyan. Marami kaming retaso sa bahay, e, sayang naman sila.”
He then turns to talk to someone, and after a while returns to me: “Ano ba nangyari sa’yo? Guwapo ka naman, e, kung payat ka lang.”
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The Creeper, seven-foot-tall bat-winged monster from underrated Coppola-produced horror movie cycle Jeepers Creepers, has its eccentricity as thus: it wakes up every twenty-third spring and for twenty-three days will hunt people down and kill them for whatever body part it has taken to liking, with no logical reason outside of self-preservation. As the movies proceed, it is made clear to the viewer that the Creeper’s anatomy is basically made up of other people’s body parts, detachable like modular LEGO, easily replaceable, and can be turned into weapons, if the need arises.
In one scene from the second Jeepers Creepers: needing a replacement head, a headless Creeper manages to wrap and trap a teenage jock inside one of its giant membranous wings. While inside the wing, it decapitates the boy with such vacuum force that the shirt is literally torn off of the boy’s back. The Creeper retracts its wing to unveil the decapitated boy’s topless body flapping and twisting like he’s fronting Joy Division, much to his friends’ concern and alarm.
The camera then switches to a headless Creeper as it disgustingly processes the teenage boy’s head inside its body, the profile of the face denting the surface of the Creeper’s body as the head makes its way up from the stomach to the neck, to peek and sprout out of the stump, like a giant shit pimple, finally forming itself into the Creeper’s “gnarly” new head.
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VS, as explanation of his creative process in his thesis defence, likens himself to the gothic metal monolith (and Superman fan) Iron Giant, mentioning the final scene in the Dreamworks production as specific image, where, after blowing himself up in an existential eureka of almost Christian self-sacrifice, the camera finds the Iron Giant’s bits and parts and idiosyncratic pieces (a whole finger here, a nut there, an unknown worm-like limb serpentining its way across the snowy haze of the North Pole) all making their way towards the great big Iron Giant bullethead, from the top of which an antenna extends, beacon pulsing, the film’s ending holding the promise of reassemblage and reanimation for a possible sequel.
