Mark Pavia
The Night Flier

Rainfields: Flights to Darkness.
“Listen to them — Children of the Night."

(Radio Static) 1-0-1 Bravo Lima. Come in, over. - - BRAVO LIMA.
Richard Dees hates his job, hates the vast majority of people who make tabloids magazines of interest and consumption. A seasoned reporter, cynical, misanthropic, cold, unethical, impostor, he is unscrupulous and does not pretend to have any. Devoid of any form of human compassion, he desecrates tombstones with kicks and blood for more photogenic and seductive poses. Dees is a journalist, a photographer, a sociopathic airplane pilot. He works for Inside View. He has already appeared in The Dead Zone, takes repulsive photos of murder victims, car accidents, tortures, baked children, victims torn in body and drained of soul. His job is to stir the basest instincts of rednecks and supermarket fatties hungry for morgues, cold labs, and graveyards, and he has no respect for those who read his articles. Inside View is a cultural microscope on violence, the paranormal, domestic and private hells, a microscope focused on the collective unconscious of the American population with the aim of identifying and defining the cultural archetype of the American mind. Inside View is pure shit.
The Psychic Dogs of the Stars, a killer headline.

Dees is aware of dealing with putrid material that calls into question the mental health of those who handle it. He demonstrates an intuition of Nietzsche's abyss, for if you look too long into the abyss, the abyss will begin to look back into you.
There is no fucking philosophy, Inside View is a depiction of madness, a diary of lunatics, of dangerous sick people... kindergarten teachers who set students on fire because they think they are planning their execution, satanic biker gangs who massacre hitchhikers for fun... and here's the thing: when you talk to these crazies all day, every single day, their stories take hold of you, they get inside you like a filthy cancer and after a while, you start to believe that this shit makes sense.

Pure nihilism, black nihilism. Never believe what you write, and never write what you believe and If you're looking for a friend, buy a dog. For Dees, God is not dead, he was never born. 7-0 Delta Romeo.

There's a man, a man who believes he is more than a man, a human monster who believes he is a vampire and goes by the name Dwight Renfield. As it happens, Dwight Frye was the name of an actor who played Renfield, the insect-eating real estate agent in Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula. But Dwight Renfield is a very peculiar figure of a vampire. Everything appears different. His profile manifests far from the classic attractive, romantic, erotic, tormented, and emotionally deficient vampire; this vampire subjugates his victims covering different routes, hides in their homes, insinuates himself into their lives, entertains with them, watches television with them, has a magnetic and hypnotic charm, wins the trust of his victims only to feed on them. No pity, no regret, just a vague and almost faded remorse for a past life. A contemporary Prince of the Night, he instinctively uses for transportation a tiny Cessna Skymaster 3-3-7 full of earth with worms in the hold, uncontaminated by the plague, rather than the Demeter ship from Varna or carriages with black horses and a vile driver. #1-0-1 Bravo Lima.

Dees' pieces have languished for some time. Merton Morrison, his editor played by Monahan from Porky's, offers him a chance to return to the front page through Renfield. Initially hesitant, Dees accepts. Morrison goads him by putting a young new reporter on his heels, Katherine Blair, horny and innocent, pure and sly at the same time, who admires Dees' work for everything he despises as the material that is dumped in pit latrines. Hindered, submissive, and continually humiliated (the homily without moral that Dees will unload on her in a bar, getting standing ovations and bursts of unrestrained laughter), she will be dragged toward the same moral corruption and degradation of which Dees himself is and will be a victim.
A hyena who will laugh satisfied and fulfilled with gruesomeness over a corpse, as in a sort of initiatory journey and subsequent passing of the baton. There is real tension between the two leech journalists, but not banal-bathetic work and sexual tension. Just tension. Stoppeth.
American provincial airports, motels, leaden skies, and U.S. interior towns imbued with malevolent charm and mystery, windsocks, seven zero, flight logs. Halloween capes.

Friday the 13 - Flight to Wilmington, Delaware Ghouls. Triskaidekaphobia.
Chapter 17, Heptadecaphobia.
Fear - Route 666, Ronald & Nancy Reagan: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

- V.O.I.D. | NIXON AT THE MOVIES.

Mark Pavia is a little-known director.
Before this film for the New Amsterdam, he had only directed a short film, Drag. The Night Flier is a 1997 feature film, almost two decades would await for his sophomore. The Night Flier is based on a short story by Stephen King that first appeared in the anthology Prime Evil (1988) and later in his personal collection of 1993, Nightmares & Dreamscapes. The Night Flier is one of the best film adaptations of his novels/stories, alongside Shining and Carrie.
No absolute fidelity to the text, Pavia eliminates everything that is ineffective on screen, fully aware of the profound difference that exists between cinematic and literary language, between ocularization and focalization, translates, returns, and concretely and creatively expands King's inveterate idea of the world as a dark, mad, lonely place, where bad things happen in depressing places, where light and darkness, good and evil live in close proximity in a narrow monochrome imaginary, where incredulity, suspension of awareness, and skepticism are more than anything else a defense mechanism to not go mad rather than a true philosophical stance to relate to things as they happen and try to manage them.

Everything seems to have changed from the mainstream horror of 1997 (it’s a different discourse for independent and underground cinema horror). Today popular horror films don't need to scare, monsters seem compelled to be good and do good, violence must entertain, the monstrous must not be existential, must not be political. Death today is everywhere, yet death is the great removed from contemporary culture and that collective unconscious/archetype of the mind that seems to remove it while it bites into it and feeds off it every day. But the horror author, whether director or writer, must always bring bad news in tomorrow's edition (because) Life is a drag, then you die.

The Night Flier is a gloomy and evocative cult film to rediscover for those who haven't seen it. Of linear and solid television structure, of B-Movie disposition and 80's VHS horror grain. Bastardized and unpleasant characters, a cruel and hopeless film that imbues a sense of unease and suicidal sadness into the viewer, a film bolder than the story, where even horror and death are white ladies preferable to everyday boredom and are dreamily awaited on the house stairs or in one's own bedroom. An unusual film, emerging from depressive and alluring fogs like something unfinished. Unsettling closed-open spaces, a rainy, intriguing setting saturated with background voices that continuously call, a charm accentuated by a gloomy and very sophisticated BlackPlastic cinematography and excellent handling of flashback. A sick sense in which the film is completely immersed, an opus encased between the Graces of Satan. The interior and exterior nocturne confined in surround in a womb-like ambiant yolk, mentally controlled with the charm of night flights and the call toward darkness, evil, death. Scored by Brian Keane with a remarkable and desperate piano and orchestra composition truly melancholic, that quickly plunges into an intense and dense atmosphere that leaves a hole inside.
The personality of The Night Flier is in its enigmatic and unsettling aura, its intricate webs of waiting for the unknown, in reserving an air of unrecognizability about the vampire's identity as an infinite parallel binary that never intersects: 1) It Is Real, 2) It Is Metaphorical.
Film that Italia 1 frequently broadcasts, but not before 03:10 a.m.
Gore Galore, vinyl climate, smell of glossy nitrocellulose celluloid in Kodak and PANAVISION.

Miguel Ferrer, son of José Ferrer, is no stranger to performances of controversial and idiosyncratic characters, he was Bob Morton in RoboCop (1987), Albert Rosenfield & His Team in Twin Peaks (1990). Ferrer is Richard Dees, a loathsome character of corrosive antipathy à la Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) by Howard Hawks from the novel by Raymond Chandler. But unlike Marlowe, he is bad. He has never been jovial or warm; as a child and then as an adolescent, he always believed that those emotions did not exist, that they were all a setup, a social convention of feelings and weaknesses to be read about in Reader's Digest. And so he ends up like a colleague who began to believe the incredible in an attempt to say the unspeakable and sees punishment fall upon him as if it were deserved in a universal judgment. Dees begins to believe the incredible and sets off on his personal and gradual descent into madness. The hunter becomes the hunted, and in his lust to discover who the Night Flier really is and thereby score the scoop of a lifetime, he is overcome by the downward spiral of cruelty and indifference to evil in which the story drains, his mind collapses, and instead of just trying to document the killer, he emulates the atrocities, loses the way of reason, and perpetrates a massacre. Of what is around him, but of himself, first and foremost.
The Kali Yuga achieved with the witch's weed. The Night Shift. 7-0 Delta Romeo.

The Night Flier stands as a merciless depiction of the tabloid press world that doesn't shy away from feeding the morbid craze of its readers (or rather - image viewers) toward the most malign and odd details of ordinary crime facts and opinions from Pawn Shop. In a film like this, the tendentious denunciation of the inhumanity of that type of magazines always risks blending too many clichés together. The metaphor of the media's vampirism sifting through other people's suffering is evident, but this film, however, provides no moralistic panegyric; it is not a discourse on information or tabloids, the center is not so much the ignoble offspring of Gonzo/New Journalism, the center is the irresistible magnetism one suffers towards the dark side of existence where killers, journalists, and bloodsucking readers are as foreign to themselves as they are deeply connected. Glacial and desensitized to any human empathy and drawn and intimately devoted to the mystique of blood. Tail #1-0-1 Bravo Lima.

The Night Flier has a wicked, unconventional, non-conformist ending. A black and white ending going deep, into the hades of Zombies, a not-at-all veiled homage to Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). An end that shows not too much, hence resulting disruptive. A spurt of blood peed acousmatic against a urinal wall is the image that will remain impressed in the mind of the story's Dees. In the film, something different happens.
Stoker, 1897 - 04:49 am. She started to believe in the unbelievable. She was dead.
His name is Richard Dees. We call him "The Night Flier". Tail #1-0-1 Bravo Lima. RAINHÖLDER.

[BLACK MAIL TELEVISIONS - Reel No. 8: The Vlad Tapes]