The Yellow Sign: Black Sheep, Lucifer, and other Evil Bastards

“c’mon little kiddies
have i got a treat for you.
at first it tastes all yummy,
then you start to turn blue”

Satan’s Ice Cream Truck,
Strapping Young Lad

In this installment of The Yellow Sign I’m going to tell you about Black Sheep, a horror comedy from New Zealand with special effects from Weta Workshops, as well as highlight the films The Abandoned and Lucifer Rising, but before we get to the filmic Lucifer, I want to introduce you to him as he’s portrayed in the DC Vertigo comics. Mike Carey is one of the hottest comic writers out there right now, and his name was firmly installed in the vertigo canon with the 75 issue run of Lucifer. There are two different talents a comic book author should have.. the ability to create compelling loose ends, and the ability to wrap up loose ends. Mike Carey has the run of Lucifer throughout and creates loose ends then ties them back together in much the same way that Ennis had within the run of Preacher or Ellis within Transmetropolitan, and as Vaughn is gearing up to do with Y, The Last Man. But there are substantial differences between the afterworld and mythic landscape in Lucifer as opposed to those other Vertigo titles, Lucifer falls more squarely in that dynamic struggle painted out by The Books of Magic, The Sandman, Hellblazer and Swamp Thing, particularly in regards to the idea of angelic breeding. In fact, the daughter of the angel Michael and her adoption take up a substantial portion of the sub-plot, with Lucifer eventually coming to treat her as something of a surrogate daughter. For my money, this is one of the more interesting spins on adoptees out there, and the birthfather’s story as he searches for the adopted daughter that he’s lost occurs not once but twice over the full story arc of Lucifer.

Picking up more or less where Neil Gaiman left off with the Sandman story arc The Season of Mists, we discover that Lucifer’s ‘retirement’ was really more of an attempt to free up his schedule so he could get back to doing what he’d intended since the beginning: getting out from under God’s thumb. Ultimately, that means getting the fuck out of reality entirely and into an area disconnected from all of creation.

Carey was able to take the character Lucifer that Neil Gaiman sent out into a retirement soaked with postmodern irony, and forge from that backdrop a tangled weave of myth and fable and already familiar ground to those who’ve read The Sandman. Carey’s Lucifer seems haunted by the desire to create a world where there could be no sin, a universe where all of creation was forbidden to worship anyone or anything as god, even himself. The cast of characters spans mythology and updates for modern times, thus we have Lilth and her private army of second generation angels, a goddess of hedgehogs in the universe next door, and a pack of living tarot intent on bringing their own offspring to term.

Still, it was the character of Elaine Belloc, the bastard angel, adoptee, and grand-daughter of Yahweh who stood out. Both her distaste of angels and her coming into the awareness of her own godhood were a compelling sub-plot, and the adoptee overtones resonated with me throughout the series. Meanwhile, Mazikeen’s conflict with her mother Lilith made me realize that Lucifer as a series was really about the trials one’s family puts you through, and how sometimes those trials just might destroy all of creation. And in general, all the adoptee shit that runs throughout this series reminded me of The Abandoned, which I’d watched like a week ago.

The Abandoned is a horror film set in Russia that focuses on twins who’d been separated, adopted into different families, who are drawn back together years later to rediscover the abandoned family property and uncover the secret that had precipitated their adoptions. Of course, this being a horror film it turns out that the charming and rustic Russian farm they’d both apparently inherited is haunted, but not in the way you’d expect. Rather, these adoptees are being stalked by dopplegangers, their own dead selves from the future. As an indie horror flick, this is a fairly well-polished freak show, plenty of eerie ambiance on set and the strange time-slips, the two character’s continuous distrust of each other, and the remote location builds towards a climax that is as convoluted and cathartic as it is problematic from this particular adoptee’s perspective. Fucking with adoptees because they’re researching their roots happens all to often in the real world, and watching it played out on screen is hardly cathartic or comforting in light of the real world trauma that these scenarios engender. Still, it’s an intelligent and unique film in a genre that’s been more or less done to death, and as such the avi file is well worth the download from the torrents.

While I’m intending to further develop this tracking of fucked up adoption stories in other media for a future feature article, I’d like to make mention of one other indie horror-comedy centered around another sibling returning home to the family farm, only to find madness and murder having overtaken the homestead. Instead of Russia, this film is set in New Zealand, and instead of dopplegangers, the monsters are sheep. Rabid, genetically modified sheep whose bite infects other sheep and humans alike with Meliothropy, or whatever it is you’d call were-sheepiness. The movie is called Black Sheep and the work print on the torrents was out just a bit ahead of the theatrical release date. Unfortunately, the audio levels on the avi file are a bit spoty, and at times the dialog is just barely audible, but the creature effects were done by Weta Workshops, the same special effects shop that worked on LotR, and they did a stellar job. Because, let’s face it, any film with a believable were-sheep transformation is an automatic classic. Sure, the lines at times are a bit coerced, and the few references to ‘sheep fucking’ seemed to have been put into the movie more that there’d be clips for the film’s trailers than for actual comedic effect in the movie. It does have its funny moments though, such as the two protagonists being pursued through a darkened cave by a bloodthirsty sheep bleating in the darkness behind them. So check it out on the torrents since it’s probably not playing in a theater near you if you’ve got the time to kill and the willingness to manipulate the volume levels as the film progresses.

And one last film, bringing this back on around to Lucifer. Mike Carey’s Lucifer is a well-rounded witty personage who’s driven by a will that is second only to the Yahweh of the Vertigo mythos. In Lucifer Rising we see Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer, portrayed in this edit by one Leslie Huggins. Lucifer Rising is an attempt to ritually cause the ascension of Lucifer, aka Horus, and even the viewing of the film is considered by some to be a magickal act. This torrent is the revised edition Kenneth Anger re-cut in 1980, and where Mike Carey’s Lucifer is the third creation of Yahweh whose years of servitude and subsequent rebellion are portrayed more as inevitable manifestations of some omniscient godhead’s scheme, against which Lucifer must eternally rebel to mantain a duality, Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer is more of a true embodiment of the promethean Horus, as detailed by Aleister Crowley in his extensive writings. As Anger himself has explained: “Lucifer is the Light god, not the devil – the Rebel Angel behind what’s happening in the world today. His message is that the key of joy is disobedience.” Granted, this is all expressed sans dialog, against a musical soundscape, and by way of signs and symbols that only an initiate or a devotee of ceremonial magic would be able to untangle. It is a powerful, if somewhat dated, piece of film as famous for its rarity as it is its content.

So let’s break this down. I read all these Lucifer comics while listening to the Strapping Young Lad discography immediately after watching Black Sheep and about a week after having watched The Abandoned. Of course all of this is available online by searching through the torrents, so dig in deep, and keep those seeds up until the next time you see The Yellow Sign.